Home Game

by Bret Boone

  “This strike is bullshit,” they’d say.

  I went off on a couple of them. “Go educate yourself, then I might listen to you. Till then, you’ve got no right to an opinion.”

  Fehr arranged for a bunch of us player reps to go to Washington, D.C., to lobby Congress. That trip was an eye-opener. I was paired with the Orioles’ Eddie Murray. The two of us put on suits and ties and spent a couple days on Capitol Hill, explaining the union’s position to senators and US representatives. We wanted them to back legislation to end MLB’s antitrust exemption, a law dating back to 1922 that kept owners from getting sued for unfair labor practices.

  A few congressmen listened to us, but most of our meetings went like this:

  Eddie and Bret enter Senator So-and-So’s office. We all shake hands. Then a staff member brings in a box full of stuff for us to sign. “For my kids,” the senator says. “They’re big baseball fans.” He must have a lot of kids, because it takes us ten minutes to sign all the balls, gloves, and posters in the box. After that, Eddie talks about our cause. He reminds Senator So-and-So that the owners cheated us and want to break our union. I add a few words, but I can see that the senator’s not listening. He’s looking right through us. More handshakes, and the staffer leads us out. We were wasting our time.

  And there wasn’t much time left. At one point we held a players-and-owners summit in Phoenix. Fehr and several of our leaders stated the players’ case. We would never accept a salary cap, but just about anything else was on the table. We wanted to play. Then Selig, Reinsdorf, and one of their attorneys, Rob Manfred, rejected everything we had to say. Manfred was a hotshot young lawyer, determined to bust our union. I don’t say that as a slam. He was doing his job. Today, of course, former union-buster Manfred is commissioner of baseball.

  That meeting really showed me what the owners thought of us. They sat on a stage, looking down their noses at us. I could practically hear what they were thinking. Dumb jocks. They saw the players as interchangeable pieces in their game. They were the kings and we were the pawns. When we talked back, they repeated their party line as if we were too stupid to understand it the first time. Fehr kept saying no to a salary cap. He said we’d whip them in court again if we had to, but we’d rather get back on the field. Selig and Reinsdorf and Manfred weren’t listening. They said we had two options. We could agree to a salary cap or get another job.

  This went on for hours. Finally one of the American League player reps, one of the game’s biggest names, stood up. He was an intimidating man, a home run hitter who towered over the owners and their lawyers. He stubbed out his cigar and went to the front of the hall, where he loomed over Selig.

  “Bud,” he said, “go fuck yourself.” And walked out of the room.

  The meeting broke up with no progress. The owners told reporters they might cancel the postseason. We didn’t think they’d go that far. They’d never call off the World Series.

  Or would they?

  World War I couldn’t stop the World Series. Neither could World War II. In fact, in 1942 President Franklin Roosevelt, who once served as student manager for Harvard’s baseball team, told Commissioner Landis, “It would be best for the country to keep baseball going” through the war. The Show went on.

  Fifty-two years later, acting commissioner Bud Selig called off the World Series. Why? Because the players wouldn’t go for a salary cap. Of course Selig blamed us, and at least half the fans bought his blame-the-players line.

  So much for the idea of the commissioner acting in baseball’s best interest. Selig acted purely in the interest of himself and his fellow owners. He and other hard-liners like Reinsdorf canceled the 1994 Series and made plans to replace seven hundred major-league players with strikebreakers in 1995. “Replacement players,” they called them. We used different words.

  As the ’95 season approached, I got phone calls from friends I’d known in the minors. They asked if they should cross the players’ picket lines. I answered the question with one of my own. “Have you got a shot in hell of making the majors? The real majors?”

  If they said yes, I told them they’d be crazy to cross the players’ union. “You’ll be a scab forever. An outcast. When the strike’s over, we’ll freeze you out and you’ll never have a chance.”

  But if they said no, they’d never make it on merit, I told them that they had a decision to make. “You can cross the line. I’d never do it, but I won’t tell you not to.” They were ballplayers, and every ballplayer dreams of making the big leagues. I wasn’t going to tell them to miss their one chance, even if it was the wrong way to get there.

  In April 1995, the day before a new season could start with all-scab teams, the strike ended. Federal judge Sonia Sotomayor, now a Supreme Court justice, ruled that the players were right and the owners were wrong. We won. Not that it helped our image much. After the season began three weeks late, I looked up at the sky over Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium. A plane was pulling a banner reading OWNERS & PLAYERS: TO HELL WITH ALL OF YOU!

  My first at-bat after the strike came with the usual case of the nerves. The rest of the year, I’d step out of the shower, pose naked in front of a mirror, and say, “There he is, the best second baseman alive!” But the first trip to the plate always scared me. Maybe that’s because it meant so much. Here I am in the big leagues. It matters. I wanted to honor that feeling by hitting a ball hard.

  Jim Bullinger was pitching for the Cubs on Opening Day 1995. I smacked his second pitch to right field. Going, going…caught on the warning track by Sammy Sosa. I was 0-for-1, but the anxiety was gone.

  We lost our first six games that year, but Davey Johnson didn’t panic. His hangdog expression hardly changed as we went on to win 12 of 13 to take over first place in May. Johnson and my dad were a pair of stone faces on the Reds’ bench, watching Deion Sanders steal bases while Jose Rijo, our ace pitcher, rubbed snake oil on his elbow and Larkin and I turned double plays. I was twenty-six, just entering my prime, having the time of my life. I loved the bright lights, the big crowds, the locker room spread. In the majors it’s prime rib, lobster, grilled chicken, and sushi.

  That’s why they call it the big leagues. Everything, from the airlines to the bats and balls to the lavish locker rooms to the groupies, is first-class. In Dad’s day the groupies were called baseball Annies. Some of today’s players use coarser terms like “road beef.” I was no altar boy, but the fact is I was too focused on hitting and fielding in those days to play the sexual field like some guys. I needed my sleep! And I remembered something Gramps used to say: “Women are your downfall.” He didn’t mean all women, just the ones that can slow a guy down when he’s trying to make it to the majors. “If you want to be a great ballplayer, that stuff can wait,” he said. Which leads me to another family story…

  Back in A-ball I’d spotted a pretty brunette in the seats behind the home dugout—the girlfriend seats. I asked around. “That’s Suzi,” somebody said. “Jimmy’s girl.”

  Jimmy Gutierrez was a nineteen-year-old pitcher. As his twenty-one-year-old elder, I could have made a move, but that would have been taboo. The code says you never move in on a teammate’s girlfriend. But that doesn’t mean you can’t find out her name.

  “Suzi what?”

  “Suzi Riggins.”

  I was smitten, but I waited. A year later, I heard they’d broken up. Jimmy confirmed it. I didn’t want to ask him for her number—who needed Jimmy and twenty teammates knowing I was after his ex? I couldn’t Google her, because Google wouldn’t exist for seven more years. So I took drastic action that will shock my kids and millions of other millennials. I looked her up in the phone book. There she was in the white pages: S Riggins.

  “Hi, it’s Bret,” I said.

  “Bret who?”

  Our talk went downhill from there. “Bret Boone,” I said. The name meant nothing to her. “Come to the ballpark tomorrow. Come see me play.”

  “Why would I want to do that?” She’d broken up wi
th one ballplayer and could live without another.

  “Okay,” I said, “but you should know I’m consistent. I’ll call you tomorrow, and the day after that and the day after that.”

  Finally she came to sit in the girlfriend seats at Wolfson Park in Jacksonville. We went to dinner after the game and bingo—we became tighter than Barry Larkin and I would ever be. Within a month, Suzi moved into my parents’ house in California and got a job at the local Nordstrom’s department store. Dad and I were on the road, so after work it was just Suzi and Mom in the house with my brothers, Aaron and Matt.

  That off-season I came home and slept in my old room. Usually. Suzi had her own room down the hall. The sexual revolution never reached Mom and Dad’s house, so there was no chance they’d ever let us sleep together. I may have slipped down the hall to Suzi’s room a time or ten, but we kept it quiet. When we got married a year later, Mom gave Suzi the same shower gifts she got from Grandma Patsy: a stadium blanket, a seat cushion, a scorebook, and a box of sharpened pencils.

  I hit .267 with 15 homers in 1995, plus another bomb off Hideo Nomo while we swept the Dodgers in the playoffs. Then we got swept by the Braves in the NLCS, which was no disgrace since they had Greg Maddux, John Smoltz, and Tom Glavine on the mound. Atlanta went on to win the 1995 World Series. We fell back to third place in 1996 and again in ’97, partly because I sucked.

  Was it the lifestyle? I’ll admit I always liked hearing applause. I never minded smiling for a TV camera. I liked the camaraderie of a big-league clubhouse, and I enjoyed a drink from time to time. In those days there was free-flowing beer in the clubhouse. That was part of treating players like grown men. Today, even light beer is banned from most major-league clubhouses, for two reasons. The first is liability. If a player has one too many and crashes his car on the drive home, the club might get sued. The second reason is more annoying. The clubs want to control players’ lives to a degree they never did before, right down to how many hours in a day a man has to himself. In Gramps’s era, players might show up at the park an hour before game time. There was more prep by Dad’s day and still more by the time I came up. Today teams expect players to show up for stretching, meetings, video study, BP, and media duties five or six hours before game time. Overall, it’s worth it. The average MLB salary went up to a record $3.2 million in 2015. But those millions come with a price.

  Today I’d be worth $20 million a year. Not that I’m complaining. (Except when I see .240-hitting, 20-homer guys who hurt their teams on defense making $20 mil a year, and even then I usually keep my gripes among family and friends.) I did a lot better than average in my prime—$9 million in my best year—and had a blast doing it.

  I loved road games in America’s best baseball towns. Fans in Chicago, St. Louis, and Philadelphia know their stuff. They’ll get on you about your fielding percentage. San Francisco has been a great place to play since the Giants moved out of Candlestick Park in 2000. But no place compares to New York.

  As an infielder, I was far enough from the bleachers to avoid the abuse outfielders got from the bleacher creatures at Yankee Stadium. Most of my interactions were with businessmen in the two-hundred-dollar seats near the visitors’ dugout, suit-and-tie guys who’d shout, “Boone, you suck!” while I walked to the on-deck circle. As in the minors, there always seemed to be one loudmouth who’d really done his homework. He’d yell, “You can’t hit on Tuesdays! Your dad was on more winning teams!”

  “Wait and watch,” I’d say. “Let’s talk in about four minutes.”

  If I struck out, they let me have it twice as loud. If I hit a home run, I’d trot around the bases and give my critics a look on my way to the dugout. Most times, to their credit, they’d bow and say, “You da man!”

  I liked hecklers who had something witty to say. Any chump can yell, “Boone, you’re a bum!” That stuff is easy to ignore. If you want a player to hear you, say something he hasn’t heard a million times. One night at Yankee Stadium, a well-dressed fan got on me about my height. “Oh, there’s Bret Boone, the big power hitter,” he said. “I didn’t realize how short you are!”

  Such a personal comment deserved a personal answer. Laying it on thick, I said, “Buddy, you should see how tall I am when I stand on my wallet.”

  The only fans I couldn’t stand were professional autograph hounds. Grown men, mostly. You learn to spot them after a few weeks in the majors. They’re the rumpled guys hanging out in the hotel lobby, handing you a cap or jersey or mint-condition baseball card to sign. A couple of minutes later, they’ll try again with a different cap or card. Some pay little kids to do it for them. It’s not about the game for these guys. They’re not fans. They only want your autograph to sell it. By signing the items they hand you, you’re turning that stuff into collector’s items worth ten times what they paid. You’re keeping these leeches in business. If you say no, they’re liable to call you stuck-up, overrated, and worse. I’ve seen autograph hounds poke players in the eye with a rolled-up program or a pen. I’ve gone out with my family and had them horn in on our dinner, asking me to sign two or three things between bites, cussing me out if I say, “Sorry, this isn’t the time.”

  Remember that the next time you hear someone say, “That jerk wouldn’t sign his name or take a selfie!” As every player knows, you can sign a thousand autographs and the thousand-and-first person will hate you.

  I know it’s bad form to complain about a few jerks when you’re making $9 million a year. But I could be as rich as Mark Zuckerberg or Mark Cuban and still get mad if somebody’s rude. Because I’m human. I can also tell you that when ballplayers say we don’t care if fans call us names—when we say we don’t read the papers, don’t hear fans booing, don’t care what people think of us—we’re lying.

  We care. There’s not enough money in the world to make it okay to strike out with the tying run on third. Or to get called a selfish prick when you’re trying to eat dinner.

  That’s the downside of a great job. The upside is the daily thrill of playing the greatest game at its highest level. The challenge of facing big-league pitching. You might be raking, batting .500 for a week. Then you face Maddux and Smoltz. You blink and you’re 0-for-8. Then a couple of bloopers fall in. You go 3-for-4 against Glavine and all’s right with the world. You suck gas one night and walk on air the next, remembering how one single a week can turn a .250 hitter into a .300 one.

  Mulling over numbers like that made me a student of hitting. I wanted to understand the game I loved.

  No, I’m lying again. I just wanted to hit .300.

  It’s a fascinating job either way. For one thing, being a student of hitting makes you a student of pitching. You learn that pitchers with a typical 90- to 92-mph fastball invariably throw a slider between 81 and 84 miles an hour. That’s how the human arm works. The instant you recognize a slider—some guys see a pink dot on the ball, an optical illusion caused by the ball’s spinning red seams; others, like me, look for a different trajectory as the ball leaves the pitcher’s hand—your swing adjusts to that slower range. That’s why a pitcher with a different repertoire can make you look sick. When Johan Santana was at his best, he paired a 94-mph heater with a 75-mph changeup. That’s a devastating combination, a 20-mph difference instead of the usual 10. Sometimes I outthought Santana—I knew the changeup was coming—and still swung too soon. I could have adapted by slowing down my off-speed-pitch swing, but that would have messed me up for every other off-speed pitch in the league. So I choked up against Santana and tried to slap a single somewhere. Mostly I tipped my cap to him and went back to the bench.

  Santana’s fastball-changeup combination proved a point that fans, announcers, and even players miss. In pitching, subtraction can beat addition. A 20-mph gap between the fastball and the off-speed pitch can make a pitcher practically unhittable.

  Pedro Martinez was a genius at that. In the days when Pedro threw 97 mph, he’d get me down in the count with his fastball. Then, when I was primed for another he
ater or a slow curve, he threw me a batting-practice fastball so slow and weird I couldn’t react. A pitch I could hit four hundred feet if I swung. Instead I’d freeze. Strike three.

  Some pitchers rely on one pitch. Kevin Brown and Billy Swift used the sinker, a fastball that goes only 89 or 90, with downward movement. A good sinker feels like you’re hitting the iron ball in a shotput event. That’s what hitters mean when they say a guy throws a heavy ball. A sinkerballer doesn’t care if he strikes you out; he wants you to hit the ball on the ground. Today, the Astros’ Dallas Keuchel has one of the best sinkers. Ditto Tim Hudson, who was still sinking the ball in 2015 at the age of forty. Hudson used to wear me out. One day he made me look clueless the usual way: sinker, sinker, sinker. Then, for variety’s sake, I guess, he hung a curve. My eyes lit up. I knocked it into the second deck and laughed my way around the bases while he glared at me. I said, “Timmy, one more sinker and you had me.”

  The sinker’s just one missile in the pitcher’s arsenal. A splitter, or split-fingered fastball, isn’t really a fastball. It’s slower than a sinker, around 85 mph, but it breaks straight down. Pioneered by reliever Bruce Sutter in the 1970s, the splitter is a swing-and-miss pitch, a strikeout pitch. Roger Clemens and Curt Schilling threw evil splitters. Masahiro Tanaka and Jeff Samardzija throw some of today’s nastiest.

  The Yankees’ Mariano Rivera blew hitters away with his cutter. It veered in on the hands of a left-handed batter, or away from a right-hander, just enough to keep them from getting good wood on the ball. Greg Maddux threw a great cutter, too, but Mariano’s was heavier. To hit it, I’d forget all about lifting the ball. I’d keep my front shoulder tucked a little longer and try to hit a single up the middle.