The more gore and violence the better, except when it came to sports. Rinku and Dinesh weren’t big fans of American football. When they saw firsthand the brutality of the sport, they were both very thankful they had won a baseball contest instead. “I could not take a hitting once,” Rinku said. Mostly, though, we watched a lot of baseball, and the guys started to follow certain pitchers. Rinku was a fan of Cliff Lee, a star left-hander for the Cleveland Indians, while Dinesh liked Lee’s teammate C. C. Sabathia, another southpaw.
At the time, Viagra, a big sponsor of MLB, aired its “Viva Viagra” campaign incessantly. The guys, who were already jingle enthusiasts, really took to the theme song—Elvis Presley’s “Viva Las Vegas” but with different words—singing it all the time. I let it go for a while, but, worrying that they might start singing it in the USC food court, I decided I had to tell them exactly what the ad was selling. I knew they had no clue; the commercial was far from obvious. There was some guy square dancing, another riding a motorcycle, and someone throwing a football through a tire hanging from a rope.
I didn’t know quite how to put it. I certainly didn’t know how to say any of the words in Hindi. “It makes your dick hard” is not something they teach you on Rosetta Stone. But through some rudimentary hand gestures and help from Deepesh, we got it sorted out. The guys couldn’t believe it.
“Sir, in America they have pill for everything,” Rinku marveled.
I told him that I thought he had a pretty good grasp of the American pharmaceutical market.
* * *
Since coming to the United States, it seemed like everything they did was something they were doing for the first time.
When we went to the movies to see Iron Man—in 3-D, no less—Dinesh and Rinku swore they had never been to a real movie theater like this before and had seen most of the Bollywood films they knew on TV. They did an impression of a movie projector making clicking noises to imitate the closest thing to a theater they had encountered. Armed with fountain drinks and a bag of popcorn as big as a paper grocery bag, we took our seats in the huge amphitheater just as the lights were going down.
“Okay, guys, put the glasses on,” I said. “The movie is starting.”
“Sir, we have good eyes,” Dinesh said.
There was no way to explain it.
“Just shut up, put the glasses on, and watch.”
After the movie started up, they were frozen in their seats. When gunfire exploded on the screen, I swear Dinesh thought he was hit. When Iron Man got in a dogfight with a couple of fighter jets, I thought Rinku was going to run for cover.
Afterward, they were sweaty, excited, sugar- and sodium-crazed messes, but they loved every minute.
“Sir, can we see it again?” Rinku asked.
When I told them that the tickets cost $18 a pop (the average price of a movie ticket in India is $2), they couldn’t believe it and then quietly dropped their 3-D glasses in the deposit bin.
Baseball was the priority, but on weekends, I tried to expose them to everything I could. When I learned that neither of them had ever seen the ocean in real life before, I took them straight to Venice Beach.
At first, the two of them just stared at the white-capped waves churning in front of the never-ending dark waters. Finally, without speaking, they got up enough nerve to roll up their pant legs and wade in up to their calves. Not a second later, they came running back to where I sat on the sand. Both wore the same expression, a charged mix of exhilaration and terror.
“Sir!” Rinku shouted. “Something is grabbing to our feet!”
What they had felt was the powerful undertow of the Pacific Ocean, something strange and hidden below the surface, rushing to pull them out to somewhere terrifying and unknown.
CHAPTER 6
The members of the Trojans, USC’s baseball team, were suiting up. Clean white-and-maroon uniforms hung neatly from solid-wood lockers in the bright, carpeted locker room.
Dinesh and Rinku looked at the baseball shirts and pants with trepidation. They had never put on a real baseball uniform before, since the ones I’d ordered for Million Dollar Arm were basically the sports equivalent of one of those T-shirts with a picture of a tuxedo on the front. While the rest of the locker room was buzzing with the energy of young athletes ready to hit the field, Rinku and Dinesh moved with the trepidation of those completely out of their element.
Suddenly Deepesh yelled from the other side of the locker room, “Coach, sir! Small problem . . . Dinesh’s cup too big.”
The previously boisterous locker room came to a screeching halt.
“Dinesh need smaller cup!”
The locker room erupted in laughter while Dinesh and Deepesh looked around with expressions of utter confusion. To find out what the hell was going on, I pushed through the USC guys and back to where Dinesh stood.
If there was a section in Baseball for Dummies that covered athletic supporters and their societal implications, they clearly hadn’t read that far. Cups are measured by height and weight, not the size of a man’s penis. But manhood is manhood. The cup that Dinesh had been given was for a taller guy and dug into where his groin met his thigh. He had told Deepesh, who translated a little too literally. Shouted across the locker room, it came off crazy. There was nothing to do but grab a better-fitting cup, shake off the episode, and get out on the field.
If they weren’t intimidated by a roomful of NCAA athletes laughing at the inadvertent small-penis joke, then the perfectly manicured natural grass of Dedeaux Field did the trick. With 2,500 seats, stadium lighting, and real dugouts, the Trojans’ home field was a lot nicer than most professional cricket fields in India. Rinku and Dinesh fidgeted with their baseball caps, which, like everything else, felt new and strange.
Well, even if they were nervous going into that first day of training with the USC baseball team, I was only optimistic. I had been telling the team’s pitching coach, Tom House, that Rinku and Dinesh were going to make him look like a genius. And if anyone could make Rinku and Dinesh look like pitchers, it was Tom.
Part of the reason I had brought Dinesh and Rinku to USC was the college’s world-class training facility, where everything—the weight room, the dieticians, the trainers, the equipment, the field, and the batters—was not only the best but also all under one roof. However, the real draw was Coach House.
Ray Poitevint had been the one to suggest that Dinesh and Rinku work with Tom, who was well known throughout baseball as a pitching guru who had worked with everyone from Randy Johnson, to Greg Maddux, to Kerry Wood. When Nolan Ryan, author of a record seven no-hitters and winner of 324 games, was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1999, he acknowledged the profound influence Tom’s coaching had on his career when both were with the Texas Rangers in the mid-1980s.
Before becoming a coach, Tom had been a journeyman major-league relief pitcher for eight years. He had some good seasons along the way, like 1974, when he came out of the bullpen to go 6-2 with 11 saves and a 1.93 earned run average for the Atlanta Braves. There’s a picture of Tom in the Baseball Hall of Fame, but only because he happened to be standing in the Braves’ bullpen when his teammate Hank Aaron hit his 715th career home run on April 8, 1974, breaking Babe Ruth’s all-time record. The twenty-six-year-old lefty caught the historic ball on a fly, and the photo immortalized Tom as he ran onto the field and presented it to the new home run champ.
Tom may have had some limitations as a player, but as a coach he is unparalleled. After his retirement as a pitcher, he reinvented himself as one of the greatest—and most unorthodox—pitching coaches in the game. He was motivated to break out of the mold, because, in his opinion, conventional baseball wisdom simply didn’t work for far too many players. “Baseball is a game of failure coached by negative people in a misinformation environment,” he wrote in The Pitching Edge, just one of several books he has published on the sport.
To find new and better ways to help pitchers, he invented novel training techniques to deal with old
problems. One of the major issues Tom noted had to do with consistency. Most guys simply couldn’t master the ability to pitch with the same arm motion and release point by throwing baseballs over and over. After examining throwing in other kinds of sports, he realized that there is only one way to throw a football that will produce a spiral. So he got his players throwing footballs to see if the repetition would transfer, and, sure enough, their baseball pitches became more reliable.
A stocky, blond, soft-spoken throwback, Tom isn’t afraid to try new things. To this end, he keeps abreast of all the latest in technology. Unlike many coaches in pro sports, Tom believes the naked eye is deceptive. That’s why he films all of his guys in 3-D at a thousand frames per second and then breaks down the footage in super slow motion to get a truly comprehensive understanding of what is happening. He watches it all, wearing his glasses down at the end of his nose.
The 3-D analysis is just one element of Tom’s amazing thoroughness. He keeps a binder with an entry for each of his pitchers that logs every aspect of their conditioning, from exercise, to sleep, to diet. He is so well versed in the effects of nutrition that just by looking at Rinku’s and Dinesh’s fingernails, he could tell what adjustments they needed to make to their diets.
Perhaps the biggest component of Tom’s ongoing success with developing pitchers is his belief that 90 percent of failure is in your head. As part of his training in becoming a coach, Tom earned a PhD in sports psychology. Even if he didn’t have his doctorate, he’s just one of those guys who knows how to read and reach people. Tom is the ultimate attitude guy. He will be the first to say that if you have the natural talent, the only person who can beat you is yourself.
It was for all these reasons—that Tom marched to the beat of his own drummer, broke a pitcher down to the most basic elements to build him up again, and believed in the power of the human spirit—that he was the perfect fit for the Million Dollar Arm project.
Most pitching coaches wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with Rinku and Dinesh. The risk of failure was too high, and the whole project was too unusual. That’s what made the project uniquely appealing to Tom from the start. To take someone who didn’t know what a baseball was and turn him into a major-league pitcher—well, that was the challenge of a lifetime.
Because I had no idea what Tom had in store for Rinku and Dinesh on their first day, I didn’t know how to prepare them except to say, “Work hard and do whatever Coach House tells you to do.”
Unlike Ray, Tom hadn’t seen any videos of the guys beforehand. Literally the only things he knew were that Rinku was a lefty and Dinesh was a righty. So first things first, Tom wanted to watch them throw. He started from the most basic place: a game of catch. He had Rinku and Dinesh stand about twenty feet apart and told them through Deepesh to “throw it at fifty percent.”
Deepesh nodded, said something in Hindi to the boys, and then Dinesh wound up and whipped the ball as hard as he could at Rinku’s solar plexus. Rinku used his mitt as a shield, blocking his chest with the glove so that the ball bounced off of it like a failed bullet.
“What are you doing?” Tom shouted. “Easy!”
Deepesh explained it again. “Aram se,” he said. “Calm.” “Adha,” he said. “Half speed.”
“Yes, sir. Yes, sir,” Rinku said, right before he whaled the ball at Dinesh with everything he had.
Back and forth they went as if they were mortal enemies trying to kill each other, the ball flying off one guy’s mitt and then him running after it just so that he could bring it back and launch it right back. What Tom—and I—discovered was that Rinku and Dinesh literally did not understand how to throw at half speed. When it came to baseball, they knew only what we had taught them, which was how to throw at 90 mph. Note to self: we probably should have taught everybody how to warm up as well.
That wasn’t the only problem. Dinesh and Rinku also had awful throwing motions. They didn’t know where to stand. They didn’t know anything.
As Tom put it bluntly, “They threw like girls.”
And Rinku’s and Dinesh’s pitching skills were light years ahead of their defense. Unlike Dinesh, at least Rinku wasn’t afraid of being hit by the ball. But they still had trouble using their mitts and had no idea where to throw the ball if by some miracle they caught it. Every ball hit or bunted in their direction was an adventure.
Starting from that first game of catch, Tom was extremely vigilant about preventing Dinesh and Rinku from hurting themselves. He didn’t worry about them learning to throw hard as much as he was concerned that they might injure themselves because they had no idea what they were doing. But so confident was he in his training techniques that he guaranteed us, whether or not Rinku and Dinesh signed pro contracts, neither of them would get injured on his watch. He had the track record to prove it.
Before Coach Tom could really show them how to pitch, the first step was getting their bodies ready for the beating. He had to transition Rinku and Dinesh from track and field to baseball training, which stressed different muscles.
After the miserable game of catch, Tom took the guys inside the clubhouse and administered some test where he pinched the guys’ skin in a bunch of different places to measure their muscle tone. Feeling Dinesh’s arms, Tom said that Dinesh had smaller triceps than his wife.
“You mean I’m weaker than your wife?” he asked through the interpreter. He was fairly shocked to hear this, since in India there were very few women who would be considered stronger than him.
“Yes.”
I knew Rinku and Dinesh had far to go when I brought them to America, but I didn’t realize that it included woman arms. I felt my huge reservoir of initial optimism draining out of me.
When the guys were back in the locker room, I had a crisis of conscience. At least for Rinku, in the worst-case scenario, he still had $100,000 in the bank to fall back on. But what about Dinesh? Coming to the United States had been a major gamble. If he tried and failed to become a ballplayer, he might still be able to get a job with the Indian army. But there were no guarantees.
From the start of Million Dollar Arm, I constantly reminded them of the ludicrous odds they were up against in trying to make the majors.
“You have never played this sport, and now you’re competing against people who’ve been playing their whole lives,” I said. “This is our national pastime. This is our cricket. The players you’ll be competing against probably played catch with their dads every night, then in Little League, throughout school, and during summer camps. At some point, they probably stood in line all day to meet their favorite player. The people you’re competing with have been obsessed with this game since birth. Hell, they probably slept with a baseball in their crib.
“And you’ve only got six months until you try out to catch up. Even if you happen to be the greatest natural athlete who ever lived, that still might not be enough.”
At no point had I sugarcoated their chances in succeeding, and yet at the end of this very long first day, I started to feel like I had duped these guys. They had a chance to be in the army and make something of themselves—and instead I had dragged them to LA for a pipe dream.
Tom tried to console me. “Aw, it’s not that bad,” he said. “Rinku and Dinesh have a lot to learn. A lot. But they are gifted athletes.”
Tom reminded me of why I had brought them here in the first place. He was able to see all the things in them that I could and even more that I couldn’t. Rinku and Dinesh were in the right place to learn. “If they are willing to work as hard all summer and fall as they did that first day,” he said, “then they might have a shot.”
Tom had a tough road ahead of him but pledged, “I can work with these guys.” The question was, could the other baseball players on the USC team?
* * *
After a few weeks of basic training, Dinesh and Rinku took the mound and faced live batters for the first time ever. Tom and I had discussed our concerns about what might happen if a batter smoked a pitc
h right back through the middle. Rinku and Dinesh, horrible fielders, would be all but defenseless against a line drive.
As it turned out, it wasn’t my guys that I needed to worry about. The absolute very first pitch that Dinesh threw caught some poor USC student right in the rib cage.
The guy instantly doubled over and fell to his knees. Dinesh might have had terrible form, but he had a lot of strength. He dropped his mitt and ran over to the batter lying in the dirt.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” he said, hovering helplessly over the batter.
The USC student slowly stood up, took a deep breath, and began the process of shaking off the hit. Dinesh, who didn’t know what to do with himself, stayed close to the batter.
“It’s okay, man,” the batter said. He stepped back into the batter’s box—probably as much to get away from Dinesh as anything else. He stood gingerly on the balls of his feet, clearly ready to dive out of the way for whatever Dinesh threw next.
The batter was smart. Dinesh’s first pitch wasn’t a fluke occurrence. He and Rinku hit batters constantly. In the beginning, just about every other pitch was at least an unintentional brushback. Each of the boys was scary to hitters for different reasons. Although Dinesh had a small, compact motion, which meant that fewer things could go wrong, his pitches were hard. As for Rinku, his long, lanky limbs made it more difficult for him to synchronize all the different moving parts. The pitches tended to be more of the fat meatball variety, but no one ever had a clue where they were headed.
I felt bad for these poor USC kids forced to face them. They had signed up for college ball, not a weird social experiment. As they walked up to the plate, the best they could hope for was that they got hit only in the thigh instead of the head. Considering the circumstances, they were great sports about the whole thing. Initially, the majority of the USC baseball community looked at Rinku’s and Dinesh’s baseball careers as basically a publicity stunt.
The boys definitely received a lot of media attention, which was in no way commensurate with their ability as pitchers. During their first few months on the USC campus, CNN sent a camera crew, and USA Today printed a major story. Documentarians Neil and Michael Mandt began filming them for a movie after finding Rinku and Dinesh’s blog in June 2008 and approaching me. The rest of the time, Deepesh had a camera at the ready to film the guys pitching, eating lunch, getting dressed . . .
Million Dollar Arm Page 9