Home Game

by Bret Boone

  I wasn’t in Burlington to interfere in any way with manager Aaron Nieckula. My role was to promote a big-league approach. “Don’t worry about striking out,” I told the young hitters, because the modern game is risk-reward. “You want to swing hard and do damage. But situations matter. With a runner on third and less than two outs, we do not strike out. Because we are professionals. Do not give the ump a chance to call you out on a ball an inch off the black. Foul it off. Or nub an eight-hopper to short and that’s a run. What’s a run worth? A lot. To the team and to you. Because when you fight to get that run home, I’ll notice. The organization will notice.”

  From Burlington I flew home to follow the end of the season. I’ve got my Gold Gloves in my den, plus a couple of jerseys, pictures of the Boone in his heyday, and an eighty-inch HDTV, my window into the 2015 postseason.

  The Nationals were supposed to be there. With Dad supervising their minor-league system, they’d produced as much young talent as anybody: Bryce Harper, Stephen Strasburg, Ryan Zimmerman, Jordan Zimmermann, Anthony Rendon…But the Nats imploded down the stretch. In their ugliest moment, closer Jonathan Papelbon tried to choke Harper. Manager Matt Williams would claim he didn’t see what happened, but he knew what happened and still sent Papelbon out to pitch the next inning. I would have banished Papelbon on the spot. He’d never throw another pitch for any team I managed.

  The Nats fired Williams after the season.

  The Cubs, with Schwarber in left field, made the playoffs for the first time since 2008. Under GM Theo Epstein, they look ready to contend for the next five to ten years. Epstein scared me by mentioning a friend named Carmine. Carmine was the database he’d used to rebuild the Boston Red Sox. “Like Carmine, we have one here in Chicago called Ivy,” he said. “But that’s only half the equation. To get ahead these days, you also have to take a humanistic approach.” He was right about that, but c’mon. Who names his database?

  In the National League playoffs, the Dodgers’ Chase Utley, one of the game’s most aggressive baserunners, plowed into Mets shortstop Ruben Tejada, breaking up a potential double play. Tejada broke his leg on the play. Aaron texted me. Utley? He was about to go on-air.

  I happen to love Chase Utley. He’s one of the best second basemen of the last decade, a hard-nosed guy who plays to win. But that slide was out of line. Even dirty, I told Aaron. Coming from me, no shrinking violet on the bases, that was saying a lot.

  A week later, Toronto’s Jose Bautista launched a game-winning homer in the American League playoffs. Watching the ball go out, Bautista made a show of flipping his bat. He might as well have yanked out his dick and waved it at the Royals.

  Suddenly I was back in the news. Reporters asked what I thought of Bautista’s bat flip. I didn’t say much because I wasn’t there. You can’t weigh in on a moment like that without knowing the full history of the player and that pitcher, his team and the other team. (Between you and me, the guy went too far, like Utley. There’s a line between legit celebration and acting like an ass. Bautista, a good guy, crossed it, and I’ll bet you a C-note to a dime he regrets it.) According to Vice.com, “Bret Boone was the first player to develop a bat-flipping reputation….Pitchers, as Boone pointed out, can showboat with a fist-pump, a celebratory shout, pointing at the sky, or literally falling over with excitement. Meanwhile, batters risk getting hit in the head with a fast object if they so much as smile.”

  Amen. As I’ve said before and will keep saying till my last breath, hitting big-league pitching is the toughest job in sports. I’m for giving a break to the batter.

  Baseball has never been healthier. We’ve had two sensational postseasons in a row and I’ll bet you there’s a third one ahead in 2016. Look at last year’s World Champions—the small-market Royals, with a throwback of a manager, Ned Yost, and a slew of slap hitters who get on base and keep rallies going. The Royals are modern and old-school. They’re built on reasonable salaries, speed, and on-base percentage. They play smart, winning, entertaining baseball. They don’t hit the ball over the wall like the 2001 Mariners, but in one crucial way the Royals remind me of that great club we had—they take pride in helping each other. When one of them hits a grounder to the right side to get a runner to third, giving himself up to help the team, they’re all over him in the dugout, smacking him and telling him how great he is. If there’s one thing I learned in Seattle, it’s that team spirit’s contagious.

  But how long can the Royals keep their best players in Kansas City? That’s a question for this year and next.

  Baseball is richer than ever, thanks partly to my frenemy Bud Selig. The game is also changing faster than ever, entering an era when the good old national pastime becomes more of a science. The new era is Moneyball to the max, as computer nerds armed with ever-better analytics put old-fashioned baseball men out of business.

  I see a backlash coming. I think there’s still a place in the game for men who don’t need an algorithm to tell them what to think. Men like Gramps. And Dad. And Aaron. And me.

  Right now, the nerds and the old-school baseball men are at war. But maybe they can work out their differences.

  I think that’s the Next Big Thing in baseball—blending two seemingly opposite approaches into a winning combination. Analytics and instinct. Harvard IQ and baseball IQ. There’s no equation that can bridge that gap. You need horse sense—or horsehide sense, to use an old term from Gramps’s day.

  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to tackle the computer nerds before they could hand their stacks of numbers to the real baseball men. Because numbers are tools. They’re input. You can’t let them tell you what to do or you become their tool.

  Example: Everyone shifts on defense these days. When a left-handed pull hitter comes up, the shortstop moves to the right side of the infield, leaving the third baseman alone on the left side. That makes sense at the major-league level, where hitters are set in their ways and the analysts have thousands of at-bats to build the charts teams use to set their defense—spray charts showing where every hitter tends to hit the ball. But the same strategy filters down to the minors, where the spray chart may be based on 15 or 20 at-bats and hitters are still learning what sort of hitters they are. That’s crazy. The chart’s meaningless, and the young hitter should be learning to slap the ball the other way. Or bunt!

  Fans and “experts” often say defensive shifts are ruining the game. They’ll be proved wrong in the next five years, as hitters adapt. Batters (and teams) who insist on pulling the ball into shifts will lose ground (and games) to those who use the whole field, and by 2020 today’s shifts will look antique.

  Example: Nerds don’t always understand numbers.

  A hitter in the A’s system was useless against a particular starting pitcher. Zero for seven for a batting average of .000. He was left-handed and so was the pitcher. Obviously he had no business in the lineup. Unless you looked past the numbers.

  I was there. I watched this particular left-handed hitter for a week. He changed his approach from at-bat to at-bat, reacting to the previous pitch, the one before that, and the one that got him out last week. And it worked. He ripped a line drive to the warning track in left-center. Caught. He pulled a bullet down the first-base line. The first baseman made a diving play. For a week, that hitter did everything right. He still went 1-for-22. His manager benched him. But to anyone willing to watch more closely, that hitter had a hell of a week. With a little luck he would have been 6- or even 7-for-22, with a batting average of .273 or .318. He was unlucky for a week, that’s all. But that kind of week can stunt a kid’s career.

  I wanted to tell that kid he was my hero, but that’s not my role. Not yet, anyway. I’m a cog in the Oakland organization—a grateful cog who might still be playing golf if not for Billy Beane, the maverick GM who gave me a chance to get back in the game at a crucial time in baseball history.

  Right now.

  I want to work with other baseball men to blend the latest tools with my bloodlines,
the combined knowledge of almost a century of major-league baseball. I want to bridge the gap between old-school ball and modern analytics, to find a major-league mash-up of data and instinct that shows the way forward.

  That’s the next game changer.

  Jacob Bret Boone is almost seventeen. He’ll be a shortstop at Torrey Pines High School in 2016, his second year on the varsity.

  Physically he’s a late bloomer, like his dad. As a five-foot-three, 135-pound freshman, Jake was on the plump side, slower and softer than he’ll be as he grows. Soon he grew to five eight and 180. Then he got serious about his diet and weight training, and now he’s starting to build baseball muscle. The last time we looked he weighed 169. I told him, “I’m proud of you, buddy. You’ve become a young man. If you keep improving, you’ve got a chance to reach the next level.”

  That would be college ball. From there, who knows?

  I caught him sneaking into my closet the other night. What the…?

  “What are you doing in there?”

  “Nothin’.”

  Do you know what Jake was after? I had a scale in there. He wanted to see if he was down to 168.

  We’ve made a couple of trips to the batting cages at USC. There’s a brass plaque on the wall there:

  Boone Family Batting and Weight-Training Facility

  This facility honors the baseball legacy of

  Ray, Bob, Bret and Aaron Boone

  who were the first family to play in the

  major leagues over three generations

  Jake has heard the family stories too many times to be impressed. He just wants to get his hacks in the cage. Sometimes he’ll ask for advice, but I don’t like to get technical with him. For the hundredth time I say, “Cage tips? Call your grandpa.”

  Last November, we drove over to Mom and Dad’s house for Thanksgiving dinner. We were all full of turkey, watching an NFL game on the big screen, but of course the talk turned to baseball. Like any young hitter, Jake wants to hit home runs. Dad sat in his easy chair, talking technique. To hit with power, he said, Jake needs to keep his hips closed as long as possible.

  I grabbed a bat and jumped up to demonstrate. Taking dry swings in slow motion, I launched a couple of phantom homers to right-center field. “Look at the knob of the bat,” Dad said. “See how close it is to his body? Watch how he keeps the knob toward the pitcher as long as he can.”

  “That keeps the barrel in the zone,” I said. “That’s why Jeter was so good. He wasn’t a power guy, but he kept the barrel in the zone as long as anybody.”

  Jake said, “Cool.” He took the bat from me and tried a few slo-mo swings. Dad and I critiqued him—“Stay stacked,” “Hands closer”—and Jake got it right.

  “Oh yeah,” I told him. “That one’s going four hundred feet.”

  Then we had some pumpkin pie.

  The way I see it, what my son really needs from me is moral support. So I’ve got it easy, because he’s a star. All my kids are. Jake may be a ballplayer now, but I say in all honesty that I won’t be surprised if he winds up as a CEO, a leading man in Hollywood, or president of the United States.

  But right now, at least, it’s the family business that lights Jake’s fire. Good for him. But I don’t expect him to be a big leaguer. While Jake’s baseball IQ is off the charts, the competition’s so fierce these days—the talent’s so deep—that the odds are against him. But it all starts with passion, and he’s got lots of that. Jake likes to hit. He’ll rip a line drive in a high school game and I know he’s thinking about doing the same thing in the majors around 2022. He’s thinking about getting his name on that plaque at USC, thinking about being the first fourth-generation player in major-league history.

  And wouldn’t that be something?

  Here’s where I express my appreciation to all my teammates, coaches, and managers—too many to mention without making the book twenty pages longer. Thanks, guys! I’m also grateful to all my friends—you know who you are—and especially my mom, dad, brothers, grandpas and grandmas, Suzi Boone, and our children, Savannah, Jacob, Isaiah, and Judah.

  I’m glad I met Crown’s Matt Inman, an all-star editor, and got to write a book for editorial director Tricia Boczkowski, who believed in this project from the start. Steve Ross at Abrams Artists, one of the best agents in the business, put me together with the folks at Crown, including the terrific Julia Elliott, Ellen Folan, Kelsey Lawrence, Julie Cepler, Elena Giavaldi, and Courtney Snyder.

  I had a good time working with Kevin Cook, whose book The Dad Report made me want to team up with him. Here’s a tip of the cap to his home team: Pamela, Cal, and Lily.

  Last, but never least, my thanks go out to the baseball fans of Seattle, Cincinnati, Atlanta, San Diego, Minnesota, and the rest of America, and to the game we all love.

  —Bret Boone, February 2016

  Born in El Cajon, California, in 1969, Bret Boone reached the major leagues in 1992. He hit 252 home runs, drove in more than 1,000 runs, played in three All-Star games, and won four Gold Gloves and two Silver Slugger Awards in a fourteen-year career with the Seattle Mariners, Cincinnati Reds, Atlanta Braves, and San Diego Padres. A Sports Illustrated writer called him “perhaps the coolest guy in the majors—and one of the smartest.” Boone lives in Southern California.

  His collaborator, Kevin Cook, is the award-winning author of Titanic Thompson, Tommy’s Honor, and Kitty Genovese. A former senior editor at Sports Illustrated, Cook has often appeared on ESPN, CNN, Fox News, and NPR. He lives in New York.

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