by Bret Boone
At first I gave the books a shot despite the fact that King Kong was the only book I ever read all the way through. (Thirty years later, this book makes two.) But why waste a USC education? “I’m changing my ways,” I told my parents. “You’re looking at a real student-athlete.” Please ignore the sound of Aaron laughing in the background, because I meant it. In my first English class, Comp 101, the professor had everyone write an essay about something we loved. I forget my topic (if you’re betting, take the odds on baseball), but I wrote feverishly. And when the prof read an essay to the class, it was mine. He actually praised my writing! At that point there were fireworks going off in my brain. And my ego. I spent a semester slaving over essays for that professor…and he gave me a C. That’s when I thought, Shoot, I can pull C’s cramming Cliffs Notes the night before the final. After that I cut more classes than I attended. Athletes had to maintain a 2.0 grade point average, a C average, to stay eligible. My GPA as a freshman was exactly 2.0. As a sophomore…2.0. As a junior…you guessed it.
This is not an academic approach I recommend. Looking back, I wish I’d been more of a self-starter in school. I’ve always been good with numbers, but even today, when my kids come to me with homework on anything from algebra to Shakespeare, I tell them, “Call your grandpa.”
It’s not like I was lazy or dumb. I’ve got enough of my father’s genes to be intrigued by stuff that matters—how money and politics and other forces make the world go around. It’s just that I never found much of that in the classroom. Besides, what preoccupied me was the simplest sort of math, like, it takes two hits in five tries to bat .400. And in spite of being passed over 710 times in the ’87 draft, my career plans hadn’t changed. I was as single-minded as Tommy Trojan, the ancient mascot whose statue stands in the middle of USC’s campus. Warrior Tommy had two goals in life:
1) Beat the Greeks in the Trojan War of the twelfth century BC, and
2) Beat UCLA
I had two of my own:
1) Make it to the big leagues, and
2) Make it to the big leagues
So I report to my first USC practice and run into the team’s stud catcher, a six-one, 200-pounder who looked a little familiar. Jim Campanis!
“Hey, Boonie, welcome to Watts,” he said. “I’m still going to beat you to the big leagues.”
I just gave him a nod. “Good luck with that.”
Jimmy Campanis was two years ahead of me, two years closer to the goal that meant more to him than it meant to me. I mean, as much as I loved Gramps and Dad, my plan was to tear the cover off college pitching, zoom to the majors, and make fans forget everyone who wasn’t named Bret Robert Boone.
Unrealistic? Sure. Naïve? Absolutely.
Would I have had any chance without that sort of crazy confidence? Maybe not.
I played second and batted fifth for coach Mike Gillespie’s USC Trojans. Not a bad life. We rode a luxury bus to play UCLA and flew to the other schools in the Pac-10. We were welcome at every frat party on campus. And we had a hell of a club. There was catcher Campanis thumping home runs, with shortstop Bret Barberie getting on base ahead of him. Barberie, who went on to play six years in the majors, was all business. He’d talk the maintenance men into turning on the stadium lights so he could take grounders at night. He and I gave Gillespie the only team in baseball history with two one-t Brets up the middle. Better yet, we had future big leaguer Damon Buford in the outfield and future All-Star infielder Jeff Cirillo (later a teammate of mine in Seattle) pitching. Our biggest name was Rodney Peete, who joined us every spring to play third base after quarterbacking USC’s football team to the Rose Bowl. Rodney led the football Trojans past a UCLA team starring Troy Aikman (twice!) and bopped homers for us as a hobby.
We had plenty of baseball bloodlines between the foul lines—not just Campanis and me but Buford, whose father, Don, was a big leaguer. Barberie’s dad had played in the minors. Utility man Jay Hemond’s father, Roland, was the longtime general manager of the White Sox and Orioles. Jay wasn’t the type to fill up a box score, but a couple of years later he left his own impression on the game as baseball instructor for the movie Field of Dreams.
I batted .326 as a freshman, with 8 home runs and 53 RBIs, second on the team behind Campanis. There was nothing wrong with my glove, either; Coach Gillespie called me “a magician on defense.” So what’s not to like? Well, I might not have been the Pac-10’s Mr. Congeniality. People said I had a short fuse, which wasn’t so bad until they added, “like Mike Tyson.” In the first national story about me, the Los Angeles Times told the world, “Boone’s freshman season was noteworthy not only for his bat, but for the loud and visual outbursts that followed his own perceived failures.” Before long, Sports Illustrated mentioned my “helmet-throwing.”
Outbursts? Helmet-throwing?
Okay, maybe I bounced a few helmets on my way to the dugout after striking out. My language wasn’t always G-rated. But I’d only get mad at myself, nobody else. Looking back, I’m amazed by my immaturity in those days. I had no idea how hard the game could be. How hard it’s supposed to be as you climb the ladder from high school to college and finally, hopefully, to the pros. I was still kicking myself for every ball that wasn’t smoked for extra bases. Bloop single? Sonofabitch! I’d practically bust a vein cursing it.
It would be a few years before I learned one of life’s great lessons: Every flare that falls in is a gift from the baseball gods.
At least my attitude helped keep me in shape. I ran many a lap for Coach Gillespie. “You’re not a bad kid, Boone, but you’re your own worst enemy!” he’d yell while I cussed myself out. “Give me a lap around the diamond!”
Everyone expected me to be like my dad, the calm, coolheaded catcher for the Angels. To his credit, he wasn’t one of them. Dad told people that he was the boring one in the family. “Bret’s passionate,” he said. “He wants to get a hit every time. He’s eighteen.”
Was he always on my side? No. One day, Gillespie batted me fourth. I came up late in the game with two runners on base, nobody out. Gillespie, coaching third base, flashed the bunt signal. (In college and the low minors, the head coach or manager usually doubles as third-base coach.) I’m thinking, What, me bunt? I gave it a couple of halfhearted tries, then ripped a double off the fence. A Campanis grounder got me to third, where Gillespie was waiting with a homework assignment. He said, “I want you to go home and ask your dad what a hitter should do in that situation.”
I did as I was told. At our next practice I reported to Gillespie, “Dad said you were right. The cleanup hitter should bunt.” He looked happy until I went on. “And that’s why my dad bats ninth. I think you’re both wrong.”
That line was worth a couple of laps.
After sprouting from five foot to five foot ten in high school, I was sure I’d keep growing. I expected to pass six-foot Gramps and six-two Dad. Wrong. Thirty years later I’m still five ten. “Little” brother Aaron grew to six foot two, and baby brother Matt matched him at six two, leaving me as the runt in the Boone bunch. That’s another double-edged part of my story, since size matters in baseball. If everything else is equal, a six-two, 220-pound hitter’s fly ball clears the fence while a five-ten guy’s fly ball falls a little short.
Lucky for guys like me, everything else is never equal.
In baseball, more than other sports, heart matters. Heart, guts, brains, instinct, luck—all those other things that make life interesting. That’s why baseball is the best game in the world. And as it turned out, being the shortest Boone boy was a blessing. It gave me extra motivation—a chip on my low-altitude shoulder. More important, my compact size helped me stay in the middle infield, where I belonged. Taller guys tend to wind up at other positions.
The power alleys at USC’s Dedeaux Field were 375 feet from the plate. The prevailing wind whistled in over the tennis courts beyond the left-field fence. Right-handed hitters like me lost some homers to that breeze, though it didn’t seem to bother some gu
ys. Four years before I got there, a rangy first baseman named Mark McGwire swatted 31 homers for the Trojans.
I wasn’t a prospect on McGwire’s level, but every year you’d find me on a handful of preseason All-America teams. Then I’d hit a smattering of homers and drive in about 60 runs. Good but not great. My average dropped to .273 in my sophomore year. My reputation still got me onto a preseason Team USA that toured Cuba, where we waited for Fidel Castro’s motorcade to deliver El Presidente to the ballpark. He whooped it up while Team Cuba beat the snot out of us. The Cubans, led by third baseman Omar Linares, were men. We were still boys. When we flew home and told our friends and college teammates how good the Cubans were, nobody believed us. America would find out soon enough.
Back at USC, I learned that playing home games near Hollywood has its benefits. One day, Doug DeCinces, an Angels teammate of Dad’s, called me and asked, “Bret, you want to be in a movie?” “Hell yes!” I said. (Now, as a rule, I can’t stand baseball movies. Most of the dramas are fake and most of the comedies are dumb. I love parts of Bull Durham, including Kevin Costner’s efforts to look the part on the field. He worked just as hard on his pitching motion in For Love of the Game, but that was ruined for me by his heat, which was way short of lukewarm. His windup and delivery looked fine, but then his fastball took half an hour to reach the plate. Why didn’t they speed up the film?)
For this movie—Mr. Baseball, starring Tom Selleck—DeCinces wanted me to play shortstop. Frank Thomas would play first base. Frank was the American League’s Rookie of the Year, but everybody knew who the movie star was. Selleck strutted around like the big man on campus. He had a decent swing for an actor but no idea that he couldn’t hit a real home run even if you moved the plate to second base. Everything about the movie was amateur hour. The director, an Australian named Fred Schepisi, thought he could have a bunch of extras dance around the field, chewing tobacco, and they’d look like ballplayers.
Fine by me—I was getting two hundred dollars a day to field grounders. “Just make it authentic,” the director said.
The batter hit a grounder to short. No problem. I fielded it, and then fired the ball to Thomas at first. Cut!
“That’s not how to do it,” Schepisi said. So we tried it again. Grounder to short, throw to first.
“Cut! No, that’s not how.”
I looked at Thomas and DeCinces. They shrugged. I walked toward Schepisi. “Tell me something. How would you know how it should look?”
“I’m the director!”
“You know shit about baseball,” I said. Selleck stood there looking shocked. I apologized to DeCinces, saying, “Doug, they can keep their two hundred bucks. Thanks for the chance.” Then I walked off the field feeling like I’d stood up for the game. I guess that last one was my only walk-off grounder.
If Hollywood baseball wasn’t working for me, the real-world version wasn’t much better that year at USC. While Jimmy Campanis made first-team All-America, I lost out to shortstops who outplayed me: Mickey Morandini of Indiana, Dave Silvestri of Missouri, Fresno State’s Eddie Zosky, and Iowa’s Tim Costo. They were All-Americans while I was a perennial underachiever.
Why? Was I was pressing? Gillespie thought so. As we went into the 1990 season, my junior year, he told me to enjoy myself. He’d seen junior year ruin other players. It’s the season when collegians who turned down pro deals coming out of high school become eligible for the draft again. “Don’t think of it as your draft year,” he said. “Just be yourself. Let the scouts see what you can do.”
Instead I twisted myself in knots. I stubbed my brain. (Is that a psychological term?) Every line drive at an outfielder ticked me off. Every long fly the wind knocked down made me think of how Campanis, Morandini, and a hundred other guys were getting ahead of me. Going into the 1990 NCAA tournament I had a decent average of .313 for the season, but only six home runs. No wonder I was nowhere near the first-team All-America squad, or the second or third team, or the honorable mentions. Then we went to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for the NCAA regional, and something clicked. I figured I’d already messed up my chances in the upcoming draft. A great junior season might have made me a first-round pick, but after a disappointing year I realized I’d probably fallen to the second or third round. With nothing to lose, I blanked out everything but the simplest thought. See the ball, hit the ball.
Talk about a fun tournament. With a slew of pro scouts behind the backstop, I had half a dozen home runs and 13 RBIs in five games. After a regular season with only six homers, I showed them six more in a week. While we lost the regional final by a run, I won the MVP award. Gillespie told me I’d just changed my future. “A first-round pick’s performance,” he called it.
There were still doubts about my attitude, though. “Bret’s headstrong, no question,” Gillespie told reporters. “That’s one reason he’s so good.” As June’s MLB draft approached, the Los Angeles Times called me a likely first- or second-round pick. That annoyed me. First or second? How many middle infielders hit six homers in five games?
Dad told me not to get too hung up on which round I went in.
“Easy for you to say,” I told him. “You went in the twentieth round.”
“Sixth,” he said.
The Braves chose Larry “Chipper” Jones first overall in the 1990 draft. Chipper got a $400,000 signing bonus. Tony Clark, who’s now executive director of the players’ union, went second overall to Detroit. To sign Clark, a six-eight basketball star who might have had a future in the NBA, the Tigers gave him even more than Chipper got. Half a million dollars.
Then the waiting started.
Mike Mussina, Jeromy Burnitz, Rondell White, and Dan Wilson went in the first round. Not me. Okay, the second round’s better than nothing. I waited for a phone call as the…clock…ticked…
The Angels, Dad’s team, took Garret Anderson in the fourth round.
The White Sox chose Ray Durham in the fifth round.
Finally, with their fifth draft choice of the 1990 draft, 134th overall, the Seattle Mariners selected USC shortstop Bret Boone.
I thought I’d been crushed three years before. This felt worse. Three years to go from the twenty-eighth round to the fifth! When Mariners scout Ken Compton called, asking if he could bring a contract for me to sign, I wanted to give him directions. I wanted to say, “Go south past Disneyland, then take the off-ramp to hell. Don’t come around my house with your fifth-round money.”
Dad was the voice of reason. As usual. he reminded me again that he’d gone in the sixth round, back in 500 BC, and hadn’t he done okay? He was now catching for the Kansas City Royals, finishing out a nineteen-year major-league career. The year before, he’d won his fourth straight Gold Glove Award, at the age of forty-one. Crouching on knees that sent stingers of pain up his legs every inning, he was the oldest player in the big leagues. At the end of the 1990 season he would retire with a résumé worthy of the Hall of Fame: seven Gold Gloves, four All-Star appearances, a World Series title, 1,838 career hits, and more games caught than any other catcher in history. Before he retired, he wanted to pass the torch to me.
He came back to Orange County on a road trip with the Royals and we had another heart-to-heart. This one was more like a brain-to-gut. My gut told me to reject Seattle’s $90,000 offer, but Dad talked me down. “Life’s not fair,” he said. “The draft’s over with, and they’re not going to redo it for you.”
Gramps was plugged into the nationwide network of pro scouts, so we knew what big-league clubs thought of me. One scout told his bosses I had “average speed, average arm strength, and average big-league power.” Another said, “His hitting is suspect. He’s just getting a lot of attention because of his name.” Even the Mariners had their doubts. General Manager Woody Woodward, a former major-league infielder, wasn’t crazy about my glove or the temper that led one scout to call me “a helmet-throwing terror.” (Cheap-shot stat: In nine big league seasons, Woodward hit a home run. That’s right, one home run.) The
Mariners wouldn’t have drafted me at all if not for scouting director Roger Jongewaard. He liked my attitude. “Bret Boone is the most self-confident player I ever scouted,” Jongewaard said.
I told Dad I couldn’t accept fifth-round money. “How dare they? I’m not signing.”
He said it wasn’t so simple. “You can pout and hold out. Maybe they’ll give you a few thousand more, but you’ll lose time.” If I held out and missed that summer’s short-season schedule—three months of games for Peninsula, Seattle’s so-called advanced A-ball team—I’d have to start the next season there. But suppose I signed right away. “Kick butt in your short season and they’ll start you at Double-A next year. You can save a whole year that way.”
I said, “Maybe you’re right, Dad. I still want to say, ‘Screw ’em.’ ”
“Don’t screw ’em,” he said. “Show ’em.”
So I signed.
Next thing you know I’m getting out of a taxi at War Memorial Stadium in Hampton, Virginia, home of the Peninsula Pilots. War Memorial Stadium, across the James River from a place called the Great Dismal Swamp, looked like it had been there since the Stone Age. I found my way to the home team’s clubhouse with its dripping shower and rusty lockers. This made college ball look fancy.
Welcome to the minors.
The Peninsula Pilots had a tough assignment that night. The Frederick Keys had Arthur Lee Rhodes on the mound. My new teammates warned me about Rhodes. A hulking lefty, nineteen years old, he was one of those hard-throwing kids who are just wild enough to intimidate hitters. Rhodes threw between 95 and 100 mph, and the dim lights at War Memorial Stadium made his heater look a few ticks faster.
Somebody said, “Kid, you picked the wrong night for your debut.”
But I didn’t care if Arthur Lee Rhodes threw hard. I was confident I could hit just about anybody’s fastball. I might have lacked experience, but not balls.