by Bret Boone
Like Maddux, Moyer was a master of the psych. If a hitter fouled one of his “fast” balls straight back, Jamie would walk toward the plate while he rubbed the next ball up. He’d say, “Damn, how’d I get away with that one?” Just loud enough for the hitter to hear. “I’d be crazy to throw one of those again.” Just screwing with the guy’s head. And then strike him out with another one!
That’s the kind of club we were. Resourceful. Unpredictable. With help from a great defensive outfield featuring Ichiro, Cameron, and Randy Winn, we could beat you on both sides of the ball. And I was hitting everything hard, feeling stronger than in my 37-homer year in 2001.
We took over first place in April and held it through June and July. I’d roll into the clubhouse and say, “Boys, jump on my back and I’ll carry y’all to the promised land.” This was the fiery role my teammates expected me to play. By the All-Star break I had a .313 average, 24 homers, 76 RBIs. MVP numbers. I made my third All-Star team, and got a call from the league office.
“Bret, would you like to represent the American League in the All-Star Home Run Derby?”
I had to think it over for about zero seconds. “I’ll be there.”
It was cool to be one of four AL sluggers—Jason Giambi, Carlos Delgado, and Garret Anderson were the others—taking on the NL’s Albert Pujols, Gary Sheffield, Richie Sexson, and Jim Edmonds at U.S. Cellular Field in Chicago. After a decent performance in the 2001 derby (including one in the upper deck), I was flattered to be invited back. It makes you feel pretty damn virile to be one of eight sluggers in the derby, even if you’re the squirt in the bunch. The broad-shouldered six-three Pujols and six-six Sexson made me look like an overgrown batboy. I’d been a first-round derby washout two years before, along with Sosa and A-Rod. It was time to step up and do some thumping this time around.
So I prepped. Even for a sort of glorified batting practice, it pays to work the angles. First, you want to win. Second, you don’t want to look lame on national TV. Everything’s stacked in your favor. The fans are jacked and so are the baseballs. I’d never come right out and say Home Run Derby balls are juiced, but if you ask me if they’re livelier than regulation, I’d ask you if the pope wears a big hat. Does a bear relieve himself in the woods? If you stuck a derby ball in the humidor at Coors Field, it might still jump out. Unfortunately for me, you’ve got to make decent contact or it doesn’t jump far.
Derby prep starts with finding the right pitcher. Some guys ask their fathers or drinking buddies to do the job. That might get Dad or Jimmy from the corner bar a few minutes on TV, but those guys probably lack the control to deliver one 60-mph straightball after another over the middle of the plate. The last thing you want is to get fooled, and the next-to-last thing you want is to stand there taking balls out of the strike zone. My favorite BP hurler, the Mariners’ bench coach John McLaren, couldn’t make it to Chicago, so I turned to former catcher Dave Valle, who was now a color man on Mariners broadcasts.
Watching Valle warm up, I was as nervous as on the first day of spring training. I wasn’t thinking, Win this thing. I was thinking, Don’t screw up. Just save face—hit one and go from there. Then I stepped to the plate and got a bad surprise. Valle threw cutters! He couldn’t help it—his natural meatball ducked away at the last instant. I couldn’t get the hang of hitting it, especially after I started pressing, overswinging, and…
Missing.
Let me tell you, it’s a sinking feeling to hit grounders and low liners in the Home Run derby. It’s worse when your longest fly ball’s one of those “Back, back, back…awww” near misses. But it’s really bad to swing and miss. Which I did. While tying a record that will last forever—zero homers in the derby—I whiffed on one of Valle’s lazy cutters.
You have to laugh at yourself when that happens. Some pitchers and hitters don’t mesh, that’s all. It wasn’t Valle’s fault that I couldn’t hit his slowballs. I thought back to the 2001 All-Star Game in Seattle, when Troy Glaus went oh-fer in the derby. Troy hung his head and I said, “Who cares? It’s an exhibition.” Walking back to the dugout two years later, with cameras all around, sending pictures of the homerless Boone to 5.4 million households, I knew how he’d felt in 2001. Giambi tried to buck me up—“No biggie, Boonie” and “Who cares?”—but the other guys couldn’t quite look me in the eye. They didn’t want to get too close. Ballplayers are superstitious; your oh-fer-ness might be contagious.
The day after my oh-fer in the 2003 derby, we had a family reunion on the field—two-time All-Star Gramps, four-time All-Star Dad, three-time All-Star me, and new All-Star Aaron, posing for a photo op. That’s one of my favorite moments.
I went 0-for-2 in the All-Star Game. My one highlight was getting a note from another AL All-Star, Roger Clemens. Considering our history, I was surprised when my old nemesis asked me to sign some caps and balls for one of his sons. You’re his favorite player, Clemens’s note read. How ironic is that? Of course I signed. What’s a beanball or two between old buddies like us?
On the road, fans gave me hell for the rest of the season. “Mr. Home Run Derby!” And that was one of the printable lines. Every town seems to have one loudmouth drunk who can somehow afford a ticket near the home dugout, a guy who knows all about the visiting team.
“Yo Boone, nice derby! Maybe you should be in the Singles Derby! The Grounder Derby! But no, you’d strike out!”
I just smiled. A guy who can’t handle failure has no business playing baseball for a living. When a couple of teammates needled me, I told them to get back to me after they qualified for their second Home Run Derby.
That July the payroll-slashing Reds fired GM Jim Bowden and manager Bob Boone. Four days later they finished de-Booning their team by trading Aaron and his $3.7 million salary to the Yankees. Aaron cried that day, but when sportswriters pressed him to rip the Reds, he refused. “Hopefully,” he said, “I’ll go to New York and be part of a winner.”
I had my own problems with the press that year. They started at the All-Star Game, where a New York reporter pressed me for a quote. I said how happy I was to be an All-Star and how proud I was of my family, and this writer kept pushing. “What’s wrong with baseball? It’s not perfect, is it?” He kept after me. “What would you change if you could? What’s wrong with the game?”
Finally I gave the guy an answer. “Well, the commissioner of baseball is also one of the owners. Wouldn’t you call that a conflict of interest?”
Next thing I know it’s a tabloid headline. BOONE BLASTS COMMISH. Pretty soon the Mariners’ CEO, Howard Lincoln, phoned me. He was hot. “Who do you think you are? You can’t criticize Bud Selig!”
That got my back up. “Nobody tells me what I can and can’t say.”
“You need to call Bud. Tell him you apologize.”
“Like hell I will!”
But I made the call. The next day I phoned Selig’s office on Park Avenue in New York, not to apologize but to explain. I told the commissioner I’d been pestered for a quote till I expressed an honest opinion. It was a conflict of interest for an owner to be commissioner.
Selig heard me out. “There are other people who feel the way you do,” he said. He suggested a meeting the next time we were in the same town. We met in Seattle. I didn’t give an inch, and neither did he. We shook hands and went our separate ways.
I still think he was wrong. The owners shouldn’t run the commissioner’s office—as they still do under Selig’s old lieutenant, the former union-buster Rob Manfred. At the same time, I’ve developed real respect for Selig. That day in Seattle he looked me in the eye and told me he had the game’s best interests at heart. Today, more than twenty years later, he deserves a lot of credit for presiding over Major League Baseball’s recent boom. The game is bigger, more popular and profitable than ever, thanks to twenty-plus years of labor peace on Bud Selig’s watch.
The Mariners led the AL West in August 2003. Moyer was 16-6 at that point. Ichiro was hitting .330, Edgar .307. I was at .299, b
atting cleanup, closing in on 30 homers. We were five games up on Oakland and nobody else was close. That was the season I got thrown out of a game for the only time in my fourteen-year career. Want to hear the whole R-rated story? First, a little background: I got along with umpires. You know me—I’m a talker. Not a chatterbox, which is a player who runs his mouth before he earns the right. By 2003 I was a veteran, a three-time All-Star with a right to my opinion as long as I said it the right way.
For instance: me and umpire Ed Montague. Eddie was a veteran, too. By 2003 he’d been umping in the majors for thirty years. A true pro, he was my favorite ump—not because he favored hitters (he didn’t) but because he called a fair, consistent strike zone. And he could take a joke. I used to tap him on the ass on my way to the plate and say, in my most endearing voice, “What’s going on, fuckhead?”
You’ve probably heard about the so-called magic words you’re not allowed to say to an umpire. Well, to put it in on-field terms, that’s fucking bullshit. It’s a myth. Like just about everything else in baseball, what you can and can’t say to an umpire boils down to two words: it depends. If a rookie curses an ump, he’s sure to get tossed. But I’d earned the right. Montague knew I was ribbing him. I’d also been in the league long enough to debate him about balls and strikes, as long as I followed the unwritten rules.
Montague was one of the good umpires whose zone was the same in a tie game as in a 12–1 laugher on getaway day when his crew had a plane to catch. But like Bobby Cox, or me, or anybody else I know, he wasn’t perfect. Sometimes he missed one, and I let him know it.
But not to his face.
“Outside,” I’d yell at the ground in front of home plate. Because you can argue balls and strikes as long as you don’t face the ump when you do it. Turning to face him would show him up in front of thousands of fans and millions of TV viewers, and that’s the real no-no. You also need to remember where the TV cameras are. These days there’s one in dead center, so you’d better not make a face and say “Fuckin’ outside” if you’re facing the mound.
“Eddie, it was a foot outside!” I’d yell at the ground, exaggerating by ten or eleven inches.
“That’s enough,” he’d say.
“You might have a better view if you got your head out of your ass.”
“Boonie, you’re pushin’ it—”
“Just do your fuckin’ job. I’ll do mine, and mine’s harder!”
None of which got me thrown out of the game. I was near the edge of getting tossed, but I always knew where the line was. With umps I said “fuckin’ ” without saying “fuck you”—a shade of difference that could keep me from getting tossed.
After the game, I’d see Montague in the hotel bar and we’d laugh about the pitch I still said he missed.
Paul Nauert was no Montague. Nauert was the plate umpire one day in Kansas City, a bad-shadows afternoon game when the ball went from sunshine into shade right in front of the plate. That sort of light’s as hard on umpires as on hitters. I knew I was in for a tough at-bat when a pitch bounced and he said, “Strike!”
I looked at the grass in front of the plate. “Paul, that wasn’t fucking close.”
“Get back in the box,” he said.
In a spot like that, you have to protect the plate. I wound up swinging at a ball in the dirt, striking out. I threw my bat. I spiked my helmet off the plate. Nauert threw me out of the game, and I went after him. “You can’t toss me for throwing equipment!”
“You did it because you were mad at the first pitch,” he said.
“Yeah, but you can’t presume that.”
Our manager, Bob Melvin, came running out to join our philosophical conversation. Bob was an inch from Nauert’s nose, yelling, “You can’t toss my three-hole hitter because you read his mind!”
“I just did!”
The good guys lost that one, but we didn’t lose many that summer. On August 15 we beat the Red Sox to move our record to 74-48. I hit my 30th home run. Then we started a losing streak that lasted a week, blowing our five-game lead. We went into the season’s last week neck and neck with the A’s, and they beat us by three. In the end, Ichiro wound up hitting .312. Joel Pineiro won 16 games, and Old Man Moyer went 21-7 without throwing a single pitch faster than 85 mph. I finished with 35 homers, 117 RBIs, and my third Gold Glove, while Edgar Martinez batted .294. That was us in a nutshell. The Mariners and I had now averaged 102 wins in three years and made the playoffs once.
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t watch the playoffs. It hurts to watch when you think you ought to be there. If you make the postseason, you’ve got a shot at forever. You might do something they’ll talk about forever. Just ask Bobby Thomson, Don Larsen, or Kirk Gibson. The Mariners were good enough, but Oakland was better that year and we missed out again. Once I cleared out my locker at Safeco on September 29, the day after our season ended, I had no desire to watch other guys play postseason baseball.
Except for one guy.
When it came to our personas in the big leagues, Aaron and I were oil and water—opponents always hated me, but everybody loved my little bro. “I was always quieter than you, a little more under the radar,” Aaron says today. “Who wasn’t?”
He broke in with the 1997 Reds with none of the hype that came with my debut as the first third-generation player. Settling in at third base, Aaron hit between .280 and .294 in three seasons with the Reds, with 12 to 14 homers a year. In 2002 he tried swinging harder, with more of an uppercut, like me. Sacrificing average for power, he socked 26 homers in 2002 and made the 2003 National League All-Star team. Our seventy-nine-year-old Gramps, stricken with cancer by then, made it to Chicago for our photo of that All-Star weekend. Gramps was jazzed to be there. At a dinner with his gray-haired cronies that week, he asked for a show of hands. “How many of you sons of guns have grandkids?” Most of them raised their hands. Then he grinned and added the capper: “Okay, how many have two grandsons playing in the All-Star Game, and a son that played in four of ’em?” He was the only one with his hand up.
Six weeks later, the Reds traded Aaron to the Yankees for a couple of pitching prospects you’d never heard of. Playing third base beside Derek Jeter, Aaron batted .254 with six homers in two months in the Bronx. He wound up with a career season—24 homers, 96 RBIs, and 23 stolen bases for the Reds and Yankees—but struggled so much in the playoffs that Yanks manager Joe Torre benched him and played light-hitting Enrique Wilson instead.
I had an easier time with slumps than Aaron did. My impulse was always Screw you, watch me tomorrow, while he was more liable to think What’s wrong with me? At that point he was as low as he’d ever been.
As it turned out, I was in New York for the ALCS, working for Fox TV. They wanted me for my winning personality, of course, but my numbers didn’t hurt. Mom’s favorite second baseman thumped 35 homers that year with 117 RBIs, a career-high 16 steals, a slash line of .294/.366/.535, my third Gold Glove, and my second Silver Slugger Award.
I was new to broadcasting, but I’d always thought, How hard can it be? Answer: easier than facing Mariano Rivera, but tougher than it looks. The best part of my new gig was covering the ultimate baseball show, Yankees versus Red Sox—even if it meant facing a new set of it depends decisions.
For one thing, it’s tricky to be a still-active player in the broadcast booth. A retired ballplayer can say what he wants. He can say, “Pedro’s a headhunter,” without worrying that Pedro might fire one up into the booth at him. Not me—I still had to play against these guys next season. What’s more, I knew that players on both teams would be going into the clubhouse during the game. The TVs are always on in there. They’d see the telecast and hear everything I said. Those guys were my peers; I had a hundred reasons not to rip them on national TV.
Early in the series, the Yankees’ Alfonso Soriano booted a grounder. Joe Buck and Tim McCarver, my broadcasting partners, turned to me. “What happened there, Bret?” My heart sank. I wanted to be straight with the TV audience. At the s
ame time, I knew I’d be seeing Soriano again in the spring. We’d been teammates in the All-Star Game, when he started ahead of me, playing second for the American League. I wanted to say, “He got careless. He took it for granted—didn’t get his feet in position—and let the ball play him. It was an easy play but he kicked it, and it’s his own fault.” But I was a rookie in the booth. I kind of chickened out and said, “Bad hop—it happens to all of us.”
Pedro Martinez started Game 3 for the Red Sox. As you know by now, Pedro had a reputation. He threw the occasional beanball. Plunking batters in the butt or the back is a legitimate part of the game, but throwing at a man’s head is wrong. It’s practically criminal. You could end his career or even his life. (Every fan should see the greenish-black bruise a 95-mph fastball leaves on a thigh or glute. You can see the imprint of the ball’s stitches in the bruise.) Pedro and I had a relationship going back to our minor-league days. We respected each other, hitter versus headhunter. Off the field, I liked the guy. He had buzzed me plenty of times and plunked me a few, sometimes on purpose, sometimes not—and players know the difference. As I mentioned earlier, it depends on the game situation. The context.
In Game 3, with the score tied, Pedro gave up a double to Hideki Matsui. Next batter: Karim Garcia. Bang, down goes Garcia. And Joe Buck puts me on the spot. He says, “Bret, did Pedro hit him on purpose?”
That’s about as touchy as it gets. The next time I faced Pedro, he’d have a lethal weapon in his hand. The politic answer was to say that it happens, that “sometimes a pitch just gets away.” But I was still thinking about the Soriano play. I didn’t want to wuss out again.
I said, “Yes, of course he hit him on purpose!”
I was proud of myself for telling the truth. At least until the next day, when I walked into the Red Sox clubhouse and who’s standing there, giving me the evil eye? Pedro. Looking seriously pissed. Until he grinned and said, “Hey, Boonie, that was no beanball. I throw him a breaking ball!”