by Bret Boone
I filled in the rest. “To get to the fastball!”
One crisis down, one to go. You might think that making the Adjustment would be the biggest fight a rookie faces, and you might be right. Of course it’s always temporary. You make the Adjustment, but it never stays made. If you’re lucky enough to stick in the majors, you’ll be making adjustments to pitchers’ adjustments to your adjustments for the rest of your career. That can be fun once you get the hang of it. But there’s another game within the game, an off-the-field contest the fans never see. You have to fight for your place on your own team.
Every major leaguer spends most of his time in a high-pressure workplace with twenty-four other men at the top of their game, which happens to be the national pastime. Like most teams, the 1992 Mariners were led by a handful of veterans who set the tone for everybody else. Edgar liked me, but Edgar was the quiet type. Some of the others wanted to put me in my place. Believe it or not, they thought I was a little bit full of myself.
“Step aside, rook.”
“Here’s a dime. Shine my shoes.”
“I’ll be checking out at ten. You can carry my bags to the bus.”
“We’ve got a dress code for rookies,” one of them told me. “So we chipped in to buy this, just for you.”
A dress. They made me wear a frilly dress on a road trip to New York.
Fine, I thought. It’s all in fun. Dad and Gramps had gone through the same crap when they were rookies. You wear a dress, you sing a song on the bus, you fetch coffee for the veterans and carry their luggage. They treat you like a turd. Like a rookie. Fine. Except that it’s supposed to stop. You lug four heavy bags and a cup of coffee through the Seattle airport, wearing a dress and a blond wig, getting laughed at all the way. You’ve been hazed.
For me, it didn’t stop. I was the rookie wearing a dress on a team-record three road trips. Did it make me mad? No, I embraced it. Why did they single me out? Because of my name? No, because of my attitude. They thought I was way too smug for a rookie. Mr. Bret Fucking Full-of-Himself Boone. That’s how a lot of people saw me, and I probably deserved it, because that’s the persona I projected. If you didn’t know me, you might think I was the cockiest sonofabitch this side of Muhammad Ali. I projected confidence—mostly because I was and am confident. But also because I’ll never show you the doubt inside. The worries. Until now, I never admitted that I had swarms of butterflies in my stomach before the first game of every spring training and the first at-bat of every season. I was scared I’d strike out or fall on my ass, scared to embarrass myself. And nobody knew it but me.
When the Mariners veterans kept giving me hell for my attitude, I thought, Screw ’em. I’m just trying to stay in the big leagues like everybody else. But I knew they’d keep it up unless I did something about it.
On the third and last time they made me wear a dress, I changed my approach. I went commando. There I was, giving everybody a moon’s-eye view on the team bus. Pretty soon I’m waltzing off the bus at the team hotel, waiting for an updraft to make the Seattle Mariners synonymous with balls-out baseball.
What happened? Nothing official. Maybe word came down from the front office, and Plummer, the manager, told the veterans to back off. Maybe they got tired of giving me a hard time, or even liked how I fought back. The point is, I was done wearing dresses.
Baseball’s all about making adjustments.
The hazing I got as a rookie reinforced that lesson and taught me another one. Not all traditions are worth following. I happen to think rookie hazing is stupid. Years later, when I became a veteran, there were a few cocksure rookies who joined the teams I was on. My attitude was, let’s not give them a hard time. That kid might be the real deal because of his attitude. We don’t have to humble him; the pitchers will do that. If they don’t, good for him—he’ll help us win.
Jay “Bone” Buhner was one of the established players giving me hell. Buhner was a big Texan with a buzz cut. He hit 44 homers one year and got so popular in Seattle that the team had Buhner Nights when fans got their heads shaved. Griffey was our superstar but Buhner was the Mariners’ leader, and he got a kick out of putting me in my place. I’d come out of the shower after a game and find my street clothes cut to shreds. No legs on my pants, no buttons left on my shirt, no laces in my shoes. Somebody said, “Bone made some alterations!” while the other guys yukked it up.
One day Buhner confronted me. He said, “Kid, I’m the one who fucked up your clothes.” He leaned in close enough to head-butt me. “You know what’s next?”
I thought about poking him in the eye. Instead I said, “No. What’s next?”
“We’re going to lunch, and then I’m buying you a new suit.”
Buhner treated me to lunch in the best steak house in the next town. Then he bought me a custom suit that was better than anything I could have picked off the rack. I guess I’d passed the rookie test. Or maybe not. Maybe he was just one of those old-school ballplayers who like to see a rookie sweat before treating him like a teammate. Either way, he went straight from my shit list to my bucket list. To this day, I’m thankful that Jay took me under his wing.
Bone, if you’re reading this, I’d like to buy you a steak and a suit.
About the same time, he bought a house and moved out of his apartment in Seattle. “Catch,” he said, tossing me his keys. So I moved into Buhner’s apartment, and when it was time to pay the rent, he paid it. “Forget it,” he said. “Maybe one of these days you’ll help another snot-nose rookie who doesn’t deserve it.”
I was starting to feel at home in the big leagues.
On a road trip to Anaheim, I shook hands with Bubba Harkins, the clubbie I used to help do players’ laundry. He pointed me to a locker labeled BRET BOONE—the same locker I’d told him I wanted when I was a kid.
And on a road trip to Oakland, I came out of the cage after BP and who’s standing there? Reggie Jackson. I guess he forgave me for making him reach for a few balls while I warmed him up at the Big A. Reggie had a tear in his eye. He gave me a bear hug and said, “Boone kid! I knew you’d make it.”
Had I made it? I guess so, for the moment. But I still had to prove I could hit big-league pitching for more than a month. A late-season slump left me with a rookie-year batting average of .194.
Even that was worth a Beemer. Jim Campanis, still catching for the Double-A Jacksonville Suns, sent a package to Bret Boone c/o Mariners, Kingdome, Seattle WA 98134. It was a small package, maybe three inches long, the size of a set of car keys.
I tore it open. Sure enough, Campanis had paid off our bet. He’d sent me a BMW. A Hot Wheels BMW you could hold in your hand.
Tempe, Arizona, 1993: I spent my first spring training as a big leaguer hitting fastballs in gaps and breaking balls off walls. Harold Reynolds had gone free agent after ten years in Seattle, so second base was mine.
Then came our last spring game. Lou Piniella, Seattle’s new manager, sent utility man Rich Amaral out to play second.
I turned to Mike Blowers. “Lou’s just resting me, right? I mean, I’m making the team.”
Blowers had been up and down between Triple-A and the majors enough to read the signs. “Don’t count on it,” he said.
“Mike, be honest with me. What’s going on?”
He nodded toward second base. “Who’s out there? Not you. That’s not an accident. And they won’t keep you around to pinch-hit. You’re either going to start or go down.”
“Bullshit. You don’t know.”
“Maybe they want to take you down a peg,” he said. “Maybe they think you need more at-bats at Calgary. More seasoning—that’s what they always tell the press.”
A couple of hours later John McLaren, Piniella’s bench coach, came by my locker with a message you don’t want to hear at the end of spring training, the kind of message that makes your balls retract:
“Skip wants to see you.”
My testes must have been halfway to my chin by the time I got to the manager’s office. Piniella was s
huffling papers on his desk. As a sweet-swinging, hot-tempered outfielder he’d helped the Yankees win back-to-back World Series in 1977 and ’78. Now pushing fifty, he still had the square jaw and sly smile that made women swoon over “Sweet Lou.”
The nickname was facetious. Everybody who knew Sweet Lou knew he was never more than an inch from a shouting match. He’d managed the 1990 Reds to a World Series title, sweeping an Oakland A’s club featuring Rickey Henderson, Mark McGwire, and Jose Canseco. Two years later, Piniella’s Reds went 90-72, second-best in the NL West, but owner Marge Schott fired him anyway, partly because he got in a clubhouse punch-out with Rob Dibble, his closer. Lou had a great baseball mind, but he wasn’t the type to play well with others. He once yanked second base out of the ground and chucked it at an umpire. His face got so red during arguments that you’d swear he was about to have a stroke. I always saw him as a cartoon character, sort of a cross between Yoda and the Tasmanian Devil.
Piniella looked calm enough when I knocked on his door. He looked up from his paperwork and said, “Son, I want you to work on hitting the ball the other way.”
I said, “Where?”
“Calgary.” He could see I was mad, but somehow we both kept our cool. “I want you to go down and hit,” he said. “Hit to all fields. Show us what you can do, we’ll call you back up.”
So I went back to the land of Cokes with no ice and seats with no fans. Pretty soon I was hitting .327 down there. The Mariners called me back to Seattle, where Piniella put me in the lineup against Cleveland’s Eric Plunk.
Plunk set me up with a couple of sliders. Strike one, strike two. He and his catcher, Junior Ortiz, figured I’d be looking for another one, but I was a step ahead of them. I thought they’d try to cross me up with a fastball. Now, they might suspect I was thinking that way, and double-cross me with a third straight slider, the obvious choice. But I doubted they’d give a second-year kid that much credit. So I was sitting fastball.
Plunk wound up and here it came. Fastball.
It’s so fun to outthink a pitcher and catcher who think they’re outthinking you. I watched that heater as it came off Plunk’s fingers. I triggered my swing. Unfortunately, this particular fastball went nowhere near Plunk’s target. Ortiz had to stand up to catch it. The ball was nose-high as I swung under it.
Piniella met me as I trudged to the dugout. He gave me his most exasperated look, threw his hands in the air, and said, “Son, what are you swinging at?”
I was in no mood for quizzes. “You know what, Lou? Maybe you forgot that it’s hard to hit at this level. You think I was trying to strike out?”
“You want to go back to Calgary?”
I offered him my bat. “Fuck you. You go hit it.”
“Fuck me?”
I was kicking things around my locker when McLaren dropped by again. “Skip wants to—”
“Yeah, I know.”
Piniella sat at his desk, working on a lineup card without me on it. “Son,” he said, “I’m sending you out for ten days. This is the last time. When I bring you back up, you’ll either be my second baseman for the next fifteen years or I’ll trade you. For a jockstrap if I have to.”
That night I called my dad to bitch and moan. He gave me his usual advice. Life’s not fair, don’t bitch, just do your job, etc.
I said, “Yeah, yeah. But it’s not right. They treat you like shit. Like a boy.”
“That’s just it,” he said. “They expect you to mope and bitch like a boy. So you prove them wrong. Go down and kick ass.”
I heeded Dad’s advice, but not right away.
Under the contract between owners and the players’ union, demoted players have three days to report to their minor-league teams. Management doesn’t like it if you take the full three days, but they can’t force you to go faster. So I took my sweet time. Roughly 71½ hours after Piniella sent me down, I rolled into Foothills Stadium, home of the Calgary Cannons. And bore down. And kicked ass. Over the next week and a half I had a hitting streak, a couple of homers, and a Pacific Coast League Player of the Week award. Keith Bodie was still managing the Cannons; he didn’t have any tricks up his sleeve this trip, and most of his nightly reports to the parent club started with my name.
Finally my ten days were up. Everybody on the team knew about my ten-day trial in Triple-A. On the eleventh day, the other guys gave me a few sideways looks. Most of them were career minor leaguers. By the twelfth day they were laughing at me. “Oh look, it’s Bret! Hello, Boonie, we didn’t expect to see you here. What happened to ten days? Did Lou forget you?”
I could have called my agent. I could have called my dad. But I’m the direct type. If I’ve got a beef with you, let’s have it out face-to-face. Or as close to face-to-face as possible.
I called Piniella’s office at the Kingdome. I said, “Lou, why am I still in Calgary?”
“Hi, Bret,” he said. “I hear you’re raking down there. Hitting four-something, aren’t you?”
“Screw that! You said ten days.”
“Well, it took you a while to get down there.” Turns out he was miffed that I took the full three days to report. “When I send a guy down,” he said, “I don’t want him taking his own sweet time to report. I don’t care what the union says. File a grievance. It might take me three days to bring you back up….”
At the same time, he was amused to have a player call his office to yell at him. The next day, Piniella brought me back to Seattle. He stuck me in the starting lineup, batting second or sixth most nights, and we got along fine after that. Seattle reporters saw us arguing and wrote about a “feud” between Boone and Piniella, when we were really kindred spirits, a couple of hot-tempered baseball lifers. In fact Lou paid me a hell of a compliment that year, without saying a word.
We were playing Minnesota on the second-to-last night of the ’93 season. The Twins were out of the AL West race and so were we. When we took a big lead in the eighth inning, Piniella pulled his stars from the game. It was a curtain-call moment, a chance for Mariners fans to cheer their heroes, Junior Griffey and Jay Buhner.
And me. While the others finished the game, Lou gave Griffey, Buhner, and Boone an early shower, the best shower I ever had.
I guess I’d made it. I was set to be Piniella’s second baseman “for the next fifteen years,” Lou told me.
Seattle fans who loved Griffey and Buhner were warming up to me. Seattle General Manager Woody Woodward, not so much. Woodward still had doubts about my fielding and my attitude. The guy had been a light-hitting middle infielder. If I hit, he said I couldn’t field. If I turned a double play, he said I couldn’t hit the ball the other way. And he needed a catcher.
Jim Bowden, Cincinnati’s thirty-two-year-old GM, had a top-notch young catcher named Dan Wilson. Bowden needed a second baseman to replace streaky Juan Samuel, who’d gone to Detroit as a free agent. On November 2, 1993, the Mariners traded me, plus pitcher Erik Hanson, to the Reds for Wilson and pitcher Bobby Ayala.
Dad and Gramps told me all about Wilson, the Reds’ first-round pick in the 1990 draft—the year I went in the fifth round. Wilson was my age, twenty-four, with a rep as a future Gold Glove catcher. He would go on to spend a decade with the Mariners, hitting 15 homers a year with a solid average of .270 or so, but his real value was as one of the best defensive catchers ever. Wilson was a modern-day Bob Boone.
Gramps told me to keep my head up. “It’s no shame to get traded. Happened to me four times,” he said. “It means somebody wants you.”
I was in California, spending the holidays with a bunch of Boones at Mom and Dad’s house in Orange County, when my new manager phoned me. “Hiya Bret,” Davey Johnson said. “I want to welcome you to the Reds.” Johnson had led the 1986 Mets to a World Series title, and kept them in the race year after year, only to get fired when the owners decided he wasn’t tough enough. “Toughness” is one of those dumb ideas that owners sell gullible fans and reporters—the idea that a manager who stomps his feet is a tough guy
, a real disciplinarian. In fact, players laugh behind that guy’s back. Fines, tantrums, curfews, clubhouse speeches, and the rest of the crap you see in sports movies don’t motivate players. Professionalism does. Players want a manager who treats them like fellow professionals—like grown men—and that’s pretty much the end of it.
By phoning me, Johnson was acting like the pro he was. Some managers act like they’re above you. They like you to feel uncomfortable, so they’ll wait for a new player to come up and introduce himself at spring training. But most of them follow the usual protocol, which calls for a phone call to the new guy within a day or two of a trade.
“I want you to know how glad I am to have you,” Johnson said. “You’re going to help our offense, and you and Larkin can be a hell of a double-play combination. I think we’re going to win our division.”
Now I was feeling better about the trade. I thanked him. We were saying goodbye, see you at spring training, when he said he had a question for me. “Can you help me get in touch with your dad?”
“That’s easy,” I said. “He’s standing right here.”
Dad had retired after nineteen big-league seasons that put him up there with the best catchers in history. A four-time All-Star with a World Series ring to go with his rep as one of the coolest heads in the game, he won seven Gold Gloves and spent 2,225 games behind the plate. At the time, that was more games caught than by any other catcher ever. He’d spent 1992 and ’93 managing the Tacoma Tigers, Oakland’s top farm club, proving himself as a manager.
I handed him the phone. “Davey wants to talk to you.”
They spoke for a few minutes before Dad hung up. “He offered me a job,” he said. “Bench coach.” He’d be the manager’s right-hand man—sort of a lateral step from managing in Triple-A, but a return to the majors.
“And?”
“I took it.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Without asking me?”
At that moment, it didn’t occur to me that Johnson’s offer could be a step toward the managerial job Dad wanted, or that Johnson had a right to hire whoever he wanted, or that this was another all-time first for the Boone family: the first welcome-to-the-team phone call to add a player’s dad to the team. What occurred to me was, Shit! I’m twenty-four years old, moving to a new team in a new town, and I’ll have my dad looking over my shoulder? Welcome to Booneball.