by Bret Boone
As baseball evolves, smart fans see through the clichés too many announcers still believe.
For example, you hear guys in the booth say, “He swings at everything.” But they have no clue. Even Vladimir Guerrero, the free-swingingest hitter of my time, didn’t swing at everything. At least not always, and not the same way. Guerrero, the American League MVP in 2004, was a freak, and I mean that as a compliment. Vlad was gifted with the talent to swing at a ball off his shoetops, or six inches outside, or off the bill of his helmet, and hit it 400 feet. He came from the Dominican Republic, where young hitters learn to swing hard and often. As the saying goes, “Nobody walks off the island.” Dominicans hit (and sometimes field) their way off the island. But Vlad’s approach was deeper than you’d think. He might swing at a 2-0 slider that bounced in front of the plate, but with two strikes he’d change his stance. Not enough for announcers to notice the difference, but I saw it. With two strikes, Guerrero would turn his front foot toward the plate—not much, maybe half an inch—to keep his bat in the hitting zone a split second longer.
In baseball, nothing’s what it looks like at first glance.
The globalization of baseball didn’t end with Guerrero, Pedro Martinez, and other Dominican players. Today baseball is an international game. You can’t rise through the minors without competing with driven, talented kids from Puerto Rico, Mexico, Venezuela, Japan, Canada, Australia, and other countries. We’re seeing a new invasion of guys from Cuba, including the White Sox’ Jose Abreu, the Mets’ Yoenis Cespedes, and the Dodgers’ Yasiel Puig. (Gramps had a Cuban teammate, Minnie Minoso. A solid player from 1949 to ’61, Minoso went 0-for-2 for the 1980 White Sox at age fifty-four, becoming the only major leaguer ever to play in five decades, but a thumper like Puig could break skinny Minnie over his knee.)
What’s funny is how the guys in the press box and TV booth always discount the talent of foreign players. Back in 2001, when Ichiro came to the Mariners fresh off seven straight batting titles in Japan, the “experts” said he’d be lucky to hit .280 for us, because Japanese baseball was comparable to Triple-A ball in America. Ichiro hit .350. When the recent influx of Cuban talent began, they said the Cubans would have a hard time here because Cuban baseball was, you guessed it, comparable to Triple-A ball. I knew that was wrong from personal experience. (I still cringe thinking about the time Cuba’s national team destroyed me and my collegiate teammates, while Fidel Castro sat in the front row, clapping.) That’s why I rolled my eyes after the Pirates signed shortstop Jung Ho Kang last year. The experts said Kang, who’d hit 40 homers in Korea, would be lucky to win a big-league job. Why? Because Korea’s top league was comparable to Double-A baseball. Kang hit .287 with 15 homers before he got hurt in September. He’s a key part of the Pirates’ near future.
Another of my pet peeves is how announcers describe mound conferences. The starting pitcher’s on the ropes, the manager comes out, the catcher and infielders gather on the mound, and the announcer claims to know what they’re saying. “No pitcher will tell the manager he’s tired,” he says. “He’ll insist on staying in.” Bullshit! Some young pitchers might say they want to stay in because that’s what they think they’re supposed to say. Smart ones tell the truth. Greg Maddux or Jamie Moyer would look the manager in the eye and say, “I’m done.” Or “I’ve got one hitter left.” That’s not being a wuss. It’s knowing your arm. It’s being a teammate. So the next time you hear an announcer say no pitcher will ever admit he’s toast, don’t believe it.
I also had to shake my head one night when the camera zoomed in on the on-deck hitter, a catcher. He had his shin guards strapped on. “That’s because there are two outs,” the announcer explained. “If the batter makes the last out, he’s ready to grab his mitt and mask go behind the plate.” Sound sensible? It’s actually an amateur move. It only takes a few seconds for the catcher to strap on his shin guards. By saving those seconds and wearing his gear to the on-deck circle, that dumb-ass catcher is telling his teammate, I think you’ll make an out.
Watching ballgames on TV made me want to ask the announcers, “Where’s Aaron? You guys don’t know your butts from second base.” But they weren’t asking my opinion. Nobody was.
I’d expected TV networks and big-league organizations to knock down my door once I retired. Teammates and managers always respected me. Writers used to flock around, asking for quotes. Dad and Gramps had stayed in the game after they retired; they were baseball lifers. But my phone wasn’t ringing with offers, and I knew why. It was my supposedly brash personality. Despite the fact that I respected my teams and the game—never ripped a teammate publicly, played hard, played hurt—that was my rep. Nobody wants a loose cannon rolling around being too honest, especially in today’s era of careful corporate management. It didn’t matter that I had baseball in my blood. The game’s establishment saw me as the Boone, a bat-flipping hotshot with a more respectable father and brother. In my low moments, that was more depressing than a case of vodka.
One weekend in 2013 I took my twin sons to Cooperstown. “Road trip!”
I’ve got my beefs with the Hall of Fame, mostly involving the annual voting by the Baseball Writers of America. Most of the writers never played the game, but they’re great at playing favorites. At my position, they made Ryne Sandberg a first-ballot Hall of Famer, but not Roberto Alomar. No offense to Sandberg, who didn’t have a vote, but Alomar was every bit as good. Jeff Kent, who got only 15 percent of the writers’ votes last year, was every bit as good as Sandberg. At my best, I was too. I’m not saying I belong in the Hall. If I had a vote, I’d think, That guy Boone had some Hall of Fame–caliber years, but not enough of them, and vote no. What I’m saying is that the voters should think a little harder before screwing around with players’ lives and legacies. And I don’t hold other guys’ popularity against them; it’s not Sandberg’s fault that the voters liked him personally. It’s just a sign of how slanted the voting is.
Every January, when the Hall announces the results, ex-players exchange a million texts like this:
R they nutz?!
Yes
But there’s still something special about the Hall of Fame. Isaiah and Judah loved running around, pointing at the tiny gloves and baggy “pajamas” players wore in their great-grandpa’s day. We got a tour of the Hall’s climate-controlled vault, where we found their uncle Aaron’s home run bat from 2003, plus a Ray Boone bat, some of Dad’s catching gear, and a few of my old bats. They put on sterile gloves and waved a couple of Babe Ruth’s bats.
That visit got me thinking about my place in the game. After eight years on the sidelines, I was forty-five. My knees still ached, but I was antsier than ever. I told Dad I wanted to get back in. “But not with the Nationals. That’s your club,” I said. “I want to make my own way.”
“Call Adam,” he said.
Adam Katz, my current agent, thought I was being hard-nosed as usual. He said, “You’ve got how many connections in the game? Dozens. Hundreds. And you want me to call I guy you never met?”
“I want you to call Billy Beane. Tell him I played for five teams in fourteen years. His teams always had less money and usually beat us anyway. I was impressed. Say I’d like to meet him, that’s all.”
Katz took a breath. “I’ll make the call, but no promises,” he said, sounding like an agent.
A couple of weeks later I flew to Oakland. I rented a car, stopped at Denny’s for a Grand Slam breakfast—that sounded like good luck—and showed up at Oakland Coliseum a few minutes early. Beane’s secretary walked me through the door to his office and I went in to meet with the A’s general manager.
Beane’s still kind of boyish in his early fifties, with brown hair falling over his forehead. He might not be as handsome as Brad Pitt, who played him in Moneyball, but who is? Beane had his feet up propped on his desk. He was wearing flip-flops.
He smiled when he saw me. “Bret fucking Boone.”
I said, “Billy goddamn Beane.”
&nb
sp; We spent a half hour getting acquainted, and then went to lunch and talked for another hour. Not about baseball as much as life and love and family, and how a guy can only play so much golf in his life. I liked Beane because he’s a risk taker, not a worrier. Some executives spend their lives looking over their shoulders, wondering if somebody’s coming to take their jobs. Not Beane. He’s comfortable in his own skin.
“I came to see you because I’m still into the game,” I said. “You always compete and succeed with half the money. I’d like to know how.”
Beane said he was flattered. “But you’re not here for a seminar. What do you really want?”
“A job,” I said.
Billy Beane was my kind of guy. As self-confident as a man can be, but in a good way. He asked what sort of job I had in mind.
“I don’t know. Something in the minors. I can help young players.”
Beane didn’t need to take a meeting to know what he thought. “You should go to instructional ball for us,” he said. “Put a uni on. See how it feels. We can go from there.”
That’s how I became a special advisor for the Oakland A’s. I got my feet wet that fall at their minor-league complex in Mesa, Arizona. For those who aren’t familiar with Instructs, as players call instructional-league ball, it’s a monthlong camp where prospects learn the ropes of pro ball and play games against other clubs’ kids. It felt good to put on a uni after seven years in golf shirts, even if I looked strange in the mirror. Who’s the aging guy in the Oakland A’s jersey?
Beane introduced me to the coaches and players. “Men, this is Bret Boone, a three-time All-Star,” he said. “He hit two hundred and fifty-two home runs and won four Gold Gloves, so listen to him. And if you’re not sure how great a player Bret was, just ask. He’ll be glad to tell you.”
I spent most of my time working one-on-one with kids who had no memory of my heyday. While my knees kept barking for Advil and a cortisone shot, it was a rush to be back on the field. Some of the kids said, “You could still play.”
“Yeah, maybe for an inning.”
They kept after me to take batting practice. “You used to hit thirty homers? Show us how it’s done.”
“Sorry,” I said. But I finally fell for that one in Bakersfield, another of Oakland’s minor-league stops. The players there dared me to take BP. I stepped into the cage, and the bat felt like it weighed a ton. I cued a couple of balls foul, then squared one up and hit a liner to short center. Somebody yelled, “One more!” I took my stance, saw the next pitch floating to the plate, and something clicked. I was twenty-five again. I knocked the shit out of the next pitch. I was sure it was going halfway up the light pole on the far side of the bleachers. Instead it cleared the left-field fence by about an inch. Good enough.
“Sorry, boys,” I told the kids. “I’m officially retired from BP.”
The lunch line in the clubhouse at Mesa was fifty guys long. “Get out of the way, kids,” I said, cutting in front. The players stepped aside. Then I went to the back of the line. When the kid ahead of me asked why, I told him, “You’ve got a game today. That’s what counts.”
At twenty, Daniel Robertson was the best A’s prospect I saw. A jug-eared shortstop, Robertson could swing the bat. He had perfect footwork and great instincts on defense. So I left him alone. Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke. After a couple of days he came to me, saying, “Bret, you don’t like me? Am I doing something wrong?” That taught me a lesson: a coach needs to express satisfaction, not just criticism.
I said, “There’s a reason I haven’t been talking to you. You’re doing things right. Keep it up.”
He lit up like Christmas. “I will!”
That’s when I remembered how much it meant when Mike Blowers, Edgar Martinez, Lou Piniella, and other baseball men supported me.
In January 2015, Beane traded Robertson to the Tampa Bay Rays for Ben Zobrist, a veteran second baseman the parent club needed. I think you’ll be seeing Dan Robertson in the majors in a year or two.
I went back for spring training 2015, starting my first full season as a roving instructor and special advisor, reporting to Keith Lieppman, the A’s director of player development. Once again I was jazzed to be on the field and in the clubhouse, even if it was a clubhouse in Oakland’s minor-league complex. Because today’s minor leaguers have got it made! When I started out in the low minors, we hung our gear bags on hooks like the boxers in Rocky. Now they’ve got a twenty-thousand-square-foot locker room. The weight room’s bigger than locker rooms in the ’90s. They’ve got five or six strength and conditioning coaches, digital video libraries, high-tech whirlpools. They’ve got chefs!
Coaching minor leaguers, you’re constantly racking your brain for ways to communicate. The language barrier’s no problem. My Spanish may be rookie level, but the A’s and other clubs have Spanish-speaking staffers to help. Japanese interpreters were brand-new in 2001, Ichiro’s rookie year, but now they’re a regular part of the scene. The challenge is tailoring your coaching to every prospect you meet. It’s not just that some of them need a pat on the back and others need a kick in the butt. It’s that different guys think differently. Some need technical help: “Try it with your hands a little higher. Close your stance a half inch.” Others need to learn to think like a pitcher: “He wants to get ahead of you with his second-best pitch.” And the job’s not only—or even mainly—about getting players to the majors. It’s about helping them max out. If a rookie-league player can reach Double-A, or a Double-A talent can spend a month in Triple-A ball, he’s done something important. It might not help the club at the major-league level, but when that kid finally hits his ceiling and gets released, he’ll know he wasn’t a flop. He’ll know he gave the game all he had.
I walked around Hohokam Stadium with Rickey Henderson, Oakland’s baserunning instructor. Rickey, of course, was a deserving first-ballot Hall of Famer, the best leadoff man ever. He’s great company, too, one of the best guys you’ll ever meet. Rickey enjoyed soaking up the attention of A’s fans yelling his name. Hardly anybody noticed me. “It’s the uni,” he said. “If you were in a Mariners uni they’d know you.” We agreed that I looked weird in an Oakland A’s uniform. He said I looked weird, period.
There’s nothing baseball-ier than a well-placed needle. So I thanked Rickey for standing next to me.
“Why?” he said.
“Next to you, my ego looks normal-sized.”
We watched A’s prospects doing wall drills. That’s a fielding exercise, not so different from bouncing balls off a garage door like I did as a boy. You stand facing a wall, three paces away. If you’ve got a partner, he stands behind you, throwing balls off the wall. You react and field them. If you don’t have a partner you fire the balls yourself, fast as you can. Either way, it’s like sparring. After three minutes you’re puffing for air, then you do it again. Rickey and I were pleased to be old men whose fielding drills and jogs along the warning track were optional.
My son Jake came to Arizona for a travel-team tournament. Kirk McKaskill, an old teammate of Dad’s, took him to the Angels’ spring training clubhouse and introduced him around. Rick Smith, the Angels’ longtime trainer, shook Jake’s hand and said, “You’re Bret’s son? Bob Boone’s grandson?”
Jake admitted it. “Yup.”
“Ray Boone’s great-grandson?”
Jake nodded. “That’s right.”
Smith said, “No pressure!”
Spring training’s too long. Fifty or sixty years ago, players might have needed a month to get in shape for a new season, not that they ever got close to what we’d call baseball shape. Today, high school players like Jake are fitter than the major leaguers of Gramps’s time. Major leaguers could easily prep for the season in two or three weeks. Why don’t they?
Money.
Mesa, Scottsdale, Bradenton, Kissimmee, and other towns in Arizona and Florida rely on the dollars spring training fans spend every March. Players, managers, and team executives may know that the
spring training schedule is largely a waste of time, but nobody rocks the boat.
The A’s opened their 2015 season with an 8–0 win over the Rangers on April 6, my forty-sixth birthday. I was home by then, driving Jake to baseball practice at San Diego’s Torrey Pines High School. He’d made the varsity as a sophomore. We listened to sports talk on the way. Dave Palet, Jake’s travel-team coach, was on the radio, talking about Opening Day. I thought back to the butterflies I felt every year, trying not to embarrass myself in the first at-bat of spring training, and then the first at-bat of every regular season. That’s one thing I’ve got going for me as a coach: I remember how hard it is to max out. That’s what Jake’s up against now, trying to prove himself against high school pitchers two or three years older than he is. That’s what Oakland’s kids are doing, trying to fight their way up through the minors.
The Mets’ chubby Bartolo Colon beat the Nationals on Opening Day. That game turned out to be a preview of the Mets’ pennant-winning season. The Nationals, Dad’s team, were supposed to dominate the NL East, but forty-one-year-old Colon mystified them with a grab bag of two-seam, four-seam, and sinking fastballs. Bartolo’s belly cast a shadow, but so what? I loved watching him throw blooper balls because I remembered Colon as a young Cleveland Indians ace who threw 99. He was doing something special, finding a way to survive.
What’s it like watching a game when your brother’s in the TV booth? It’s interactive. When Aaron or one of his partners says something I disagree with, I text him. Tell Sutcliffe he’s dead wrong. Aaron checks his phone between innings and texts me back. Sut sez ur wrong. We’re all still busting each other’s balls like we did in our playing days.
It usually ends like this: Tell Sut I was right as usual lol.
In May I flew to Chicago, rented a car, and drove three hours to Davenport, Iowa, home of the Quad Cities River Bandits. They’re the Astros’ affiliate in the Class A Midwest League, three steps down from the majors. I was there to join the visiting team, the Beloit (Wisconsin) Snappers, one of Oakland’s A-ball clubs. My job was twofold: help the Snappers without getting in the manager’s way, and keep my eyes peeled for talent on both teams.