Home Game

by Bret Boone

  I wound up smacking 19 homers for Jacksonville that year. Jim Campanis, who’d been promoted to Double-A along with me (of course), had 15. The minors’ biweekly bible, Baseball America, named me the game’s 99th-best prospect. Not so bad, I guess, for the 134th pick of the 1990 draft. But I was dying to make up ground on Chipper Jones, Jeff Bagwell, and the others ahead of me on Baseball America’s minor-league list. So I stepped up my game. Thousands of grounders. More hours in the batting cage. In 1992 I got another promotion—to the Calgary Cannons of the Triple-A Pacific Coast League.

  Now we’re getting somewhere, I thought. This was Triple-A ball, the minors’ highest level, one phone call from the majors. It felt like I’d taken forever to get here, but I was still only twenty-three. That was three years younger than the average Triple-A player. And I was learning intriguing details all the time.

  For one thing, it’s easier to hit in Triple-A baseball than in Double-A. That probably sounds crazy. Double-A pitchers may be more talented than Triple-A pitchers but the Triple-A guys are more polished. They’re older and wiser. A big part of hitting—one of the biggest—is thinking along with the pitcher’s pattern. Outsmarting him. You can do that in Triple-A (and in the majors) because he has a pattern. He has a pretty good idea where the ball’s going before he throws it. He might even get a breaking ball over the plate on purpose. That doesn’t happen so much in Double-A ball, where pitchers are more like Nuke LaLoosh, the wild phenom in Bull Durham.

  For another thing, I found out I could make it at the minors’ top level without learning to hit a breaking ball. At least a good one. Curveball, slider, splitter, screwball, that ain’t my style. And even at the Triple-A level, where the other team’s ace might—I say might—throw a breaking ball for a strike, it’s not happening twice in a row. So I developed a simple plan: sit on fastballs.

  To sit on a pitch means you won’t swing at anything else. Throw me a curve and a couple of sliders that catch the plate in Calgary, Mr. LaLoosh, and I’m your strikeout victim. But if you throw me one fastball anywhere near the middle of the plate, I’ll be waiting for it.

  Using that approach, I batted .290 with 48 homers in 402 minor-league games.

  Meanwhile, I enjoyed baseball life at this new, higher level. At first it was strange playing home games in Calgary, in western Canada, holding my cap over my heart for two national anthems before home games. But do you know what really weirded me out? Canadian restaurants serve Coke with no ice.

  “Can I have some ice in my drink?”

  “We don’t do it like that,” they tell you.

  “But I like ice.”

  “It’s cold already,” they say. Canadians hate ice. Or maybe they’re saving it for hockey rinks.

  In 1992 I batted .314 with 13 homers and 73 RBIs for the Calgary Cannons. When Baseball America published its new list of the 100 best prospects, I’d moved up. Two whole spots, to 97th place. Oh, I was pissed. It took me two good years to pass the 98th-best guy! At this rate I’d be older than Gramps by the time I got to Seattle.

  A year later I was hitting .332 in Calgary. The parent club was running last in the AL West. Fans in Seattle were booing, and Mariners second baseman Harold Reynolds, a two-time All-Star, was slowing down a little. There was talk that the Mariners might call up the Boone kid. And hey—wouldn’t that make him the first third-generation player ever?

  I heard the talk but tried not to listen. My job was to keep my head down and keep hacking.

  Our manager at Calgary, Keith Bodie, was a minor-league lifer from Brooklyn. Good guy, but gruff. If you needled him when we were losing he could get as prickly as his big black disco-era mustache. But this one night we were winning, so everybody was getting along. I smoked a single to right. I was rounding first base when Raul Mondesi, the right fielder, threw behind me, to the first baseman. Mondesi loved to show off his arm. I was safe—it wasn’t even close—but the next thing you know, Bodie sent another player out to replace me.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked him.

  “Pinch-running,” the guy said.

  “Not for me you’re not.”

  I held my ground while Bodie came steaming out of the dugout. “You lazy-ass motherfucker!” he said. “Get off the field.”

  “I beg your pardon?” I said. Or words to that effect.

  “You want to play for me, you run hard.”

  “Fuck you, Keith. I always run hard!” It was true. I may not have been the most virtuous guy, but I always hustled, partly because every leg hit got me a little closer to the majors. Now my manager was showing me up in front of the fans. In front of my teammates. Even worse, he was going to send a report to the parent club after the game. If Bodie said I was dogging it, the Mariners might never call me up.

  “Sit your ass down in the dugout!” he yelled. “You’re out of the game!”

  At that point my blood pressure was off the scale. My fists were clenched. If I’d gotten near the dugout I’d probably have started smashing it up. That’s when Bodie stepped closer and pointed right at my nose. And he had a big grin on his face.

  “Get out of here,” he said. “You’ve got no business on my team. You know why? Because there’s a car outside, waiting to take you to the airport. You’re going to the big leagues.”

  I’d been punk’d! As soon as Bodie told me I was going to the majors, he hugged me. A couple of photographers popped out of the dugout, snapping pictures. My Calgary teammates gave me a round of applause. They must have been wishing it was them going up, but they were happy for me.

  I called my mom first, then Dad, then Gramps, saying “I’m goin’ up!” Too excited to sleep, I stayed up all night playing solitaire.

  The next morning, I flew to meet the big club in Baltimore, where the Mariners were playing the Orioles that night. For the first time in my life I flew first-class, because that’s how they do things in the majors.

  There was a businessman across the aisle from me. “Where you headed, son?” he asked, looking me over. I guess he wasn’t used to seeing twenty-three-year-old kids wearing jeans and sneakers in the first-class cabin.

  “To the big leagues,” I said.

  “Come on.”

  “It’s true. Come out to the park and you can watch me.”

  The businessman was an Orioles fan. He said he couldn’t make it to the game, but he’d watch on TV. “Tell me something,” he said. “How do you think you’ll do your first time up?”

  “I don’t know, but don’t miss it. You’re gonna see a ball hit hard somewhere.”

  This was going to be nothing like my debut with the Peninsula Pilots. If I needed a reminder, all I had to do was check out all the cameras in my face at Camden Yards. The Mariners had tipped off the press to a feel-good story. Bret Boone was on his way, following his father and grandpa to the major leagues.

  The reporters crowded around. They wanted to know how proud I was.

  “What’s it like to be the first third-generation player ever?”

  “Have you called your dad yet? Does your grandpa know?”

  “How do you feel?”

  To be honest with you, I felt bleary from my solitaire-y, sleepless night. Bleary and a little pissed-off.

  Yes, I was proud to be a Boone. Of course it was special to be part of something that never happened before, part of baseball history. But the Mariners weren’t calling me up because of my name. They were calling me up because I earned it. I had worked my ass off to prove myself in the minors. The Mariners wanted a second baseman who could field his position and hit some balls hard. That was me. But try telling that to the writers following me off the field in Calgary and the TV crews meeting me at Camden Yards. To them I was a one-day human interest story. I was starting to wish my name was Bret Smith.

  I’m not proud to say that. Like I told you before, I was immature. Thinking back on that day, it’s a little embarrassing that I didn’t spend more time telling everybody how special it felt to carry on the big-league tr
adition Gramps started and Dad passed on to me. But that would have been a lie. All I can say is that I had blinders on. I just didn’t want anybody saying I got a pass because of my name.

  I had a lot to learn.

  Starting with how to hit big-league pitching.

  It’s a cliché, but it’s true—hitting a baseball is the toughest job in sports. It never seemed that way in Little League, high school, or college because I was a natural hitter. When reporters asked Gramps if he thought I could match him and Dad now that I was in the majors, he told them match wasn’t the word.

  “Bret has more talent that we did,” he said.

  I was ready to prove it.

  It was Wednesday, August 19, 1992. A hot night in Baltimore. Seattle manager Bill Plummer had Ken Griffey Jr. batting third and Lance Parrish hitting cleanup. Junior was seven months younger than I was, but he’d been in the majors since he was nineteen. He had already hit more than 100 homers for the Mariners. We’d known each other since we were kids. Back when his father was playing outfield for the Reds, Junior and I goofed around a few times when they played my dad and the Phillies. Now he came up to me with a big smile on his face. He stuck out his hand and said, “Welcome to the big leagues.” A few minutes later we went out for batting practice. That was a real eye-opener, the first of my Welcome to the Show moments—watching Junior Griffey take BP. The ball made a different sound when he hit it. A smack like the ball must be hurt. And his BP homers didn’t just clear the fence; some of them were still going up when they started bouncing around the upper deck. That moment—batting practice at Camden Yards in August of ’92—taught me a lesson I never forgot. It taught me that there was at least one guy with so much talent that he made whatever I had look ordinary. A once-in-a-generation guy so good I don’t mind calling him a sort of a genius. To play in a lineup with a guy like Griffey, I was going to have to work harder than ever.

  Plummer wrote Boone in the seventh slot. In the top of the second inning, Jay Buhner doubled and I came up to face Orioles starter Arthur Lee Rhodes. Yes, the same flamethrowing kid I’d faced in my first pro at-bat two years before. Throwing as hard as ever. I gave Rhodes a look, like, You again?

  Rhodes threw a fastball. I ripped it to center for an RBI single.

  Let me tell you, that was one hell of a feeling—hearing my teammates clap while I rounded first base with a 1.000 batting average, seeing an ump take the baseball out of the game. My first big-league hit. Randy Milligan, the Orioles’ first baseman, gave me a smile. “Two thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine to go,” he said.

  That’s another moment I never forgot. Here’s Milligan, a veteran, saying I could end up with 3,000 hits. I guess he’d heard I was a hotshot.

  I couldn’t agree. I was thinking, Shit, why would I settle for three thousand?

  A week later I was 3-for-22.

  For a month, every ball I hit hard was an atom ball. Right at ’em. Except that I’m lying. I might have told Dad and Gramps I was hitting nothing but atom balls, but mostly I was striking out, popping up, hitting weak little grounders to infielders. You know all those terms announcers use so they don’t repeat “grounder” all the time? They say you hit a roller, a nubber, a chopper, a tapper, a hopper, a bleeder, a comebacker. Throw in a couple of strikeouts and you’ve got a doubleheader for me around that time.

  One day in Detroit I’m sitting in the dugout with Mike Blowers. Going crazy. “The big leagues is hard,” I said.

  Mike was a veteran who’d been up and down his whole career. He was never more than a bad month from getting shipped to the minors. “You bet your ass,” he said.

  I was discovering a major difference between the major leagues and the minors. In a nutshell, it’s this: Minor leaguers pitch to their strength. Major leaguers pitch to your weakness.

  That’s why I could make it all the way up through the Mariners’ farm system without learning how to hit a decent breaking ball. In the minors, a pitcher’s strength is almost always his fastball. That’s what got him to pro ball in the first place. It’s the pitch he can throw where he wants it, or at least pretty close. He figures that if he can get two strikes on you, he’ll strike you out with it. Meanwhile he’s just learning to throw a breaking ball. With a few freaky exceptions (I’ll talk about them later), nobody succeeds throwing only one pitch. So even if a pitcher throws 100 mph, he’s learning a slider, a curve, or some other pitch to mix in with the hammer he wants to bring down for strike three.

  But because he’s still learning, your enemy’s all over the place with that breaking pitch. I can’t tell you how many bush-league at-bats start like this: slider for ball one; slider for ball two. After that I’d be sitting fastball, waiting to pounce on the heat I knew was coming next. On the rare occasions when a minor leaguer got three breaking pitches over or blew a fastball by me, I’d strike out and tip my cap to him. But that didn’t happen too often, as you can tell from my .332 average for the Triple-A Calgary Cannons.

  It’s different in the majors. As I was discovering, big-league pitchers aren’t just better, they’re better in a very particular way. They won’t let you sit on fastballs.

  The night I put on a big-league uniform, my at-bats started going like this: slider for ball one; slider for ball two. Now I’m sitting fastball. Instead I got slider for strike one; curveball for strike two. Now I didn’t know what to expect. He could get me with another breaking pitch. Or he could get me with a fastball—the first one I’d seen this at-bat—while I was looking for something else.

  Instead of sitting on a fastball, I was taking a seat on the bench.

  Six weeks into my major-league career, I checked my average on the scoreboard at the Kingdome in Seattle. In numbers ten feet high, it read .197. Ow.

  That’s when Edgar Martinez took me aside. He said, “Kid, you’re going to have to make an adjustment.”

  “Huh?”

  “You’ve got to hit the breaking ball to get to the fastball.”

  Let me tell you about Edgar Martinez. He was our third baseman and DH, which in Edgar’s case stood for distinguished hitter. He came from Puerto Rico, had dark curly hair, and always looked like he needed a shave. He had a quick smile and an even quicker bat. He was only twenty-nine, but guys looked up to him so much they called him “Papi” years before David “Big Papi” Ortiz came along. By 1992, when he pulled me aside for a veteran-to-rookie talk, Papi had batted .300 or better two years in row. He was on his way to his best season yet—a .343 average with 18 homers, a league-leading 46 doubles, and only 61 strikeouts all year. And yet this baseball veteran took time to help a stubborn, clueless rookie survive in the majors. It was Edgar who taught me about the Adjustment.

  “You’ve got to hit the breaking ball,” he said, “to get to the fastball.”

  What did he mean by that? Simple: I had to prove I could cope with major-league sliders, curves, and splitters, or why would a major-league pitcher ever throw me anything else? That’s why I couldn’t keep sitting on fastballs. If I did, I might never see one again. Big-league pitchers are the best in the world; they’ll prey on your weakness until you adapt.

  The minors are full of guys who couldn’t adapt. I wasn’t going to be one of them. So I changed my style of hitting, even changed my stance. Instead of sitting fastball, I looked for breaking balls. I hung back in the batter’s box, learning to recognize a breaking pitch on its way to the plate. That’s hard to explain without getting too technical, but it comes down to how a pitch appears as it leaves the pitcher’s hand. A breaking ball looks a little higher coming off his fingers. Maybe that’s because it stays up at the level of his fingers a split second longer, while the fastball starts bearing down on you right away.

  For me, at least, that split second made all the difference. Once I started watching for that telltale sign—the ball finger-high for an extra hundredth of a second—I started hitting again.

  It felt weird at first, letting fastballs go by. They’d been my meat for so long. Sittin
g on breaking balls takes more patience than I thought I had. It means waiting, holding back. It feels like sitting in a rocking chair, and from that position you can’t trigger your swing fast enough to catch up with a fastball. But you can time the shit out of a curve.

  After my sit-down with Edgar, I started sitting on breaking balls. Leaning back in my rocking chair, I’d rock forward to handle sliders and curves. Pretty soon I got my average up to .200, then .210 and .220, with a couple of upper-deck homers.

  In the major leagues, word gets around. Pitchers and catchers notice a hitter’s tendencies. So do advance scouts, the guys big-league clubs send ahead of the team to watch the next couple of opponents on their schedule. “The Boone kid’s starting to hit off-speed pitches,” they reported. And before you know it, enemy pitchers changed their approach to beat my new approach. This is the game within the game, the chess match that never ends. As soon as I adjusted to the pattern that was getting me out, they ditched it. “If he’s going to hit breaking stuff and let fastballs go by, we’ll throw him fastballs.”

  So I went back to sitting on fastballs.

  One night at the Kingdome, we were facing a starter who’d thrown me nothing but junk a week before. First pitch, fastball. I crushed it over the center-field fence. The fans cheered me around the bases and into the dugout. They were yelling so loud I couldn’t hear Edgar, but I didn’t have to read his lips to know what he was saying.

  “You gotta hit the breaking ball…”