They were never too tired to work. They were never late. And they never complained. They were all baseball, all the time. Pitching is about consistently replicating the same motion through muscle memory. The only way to acquire that muscle memory is to force it into place by repeating the motion over and over and over. Rinku and Dinesh understood this and took it to a whole other level. If they learned how to throw a slider in training, they challenged themselves by returning home at night to practice it one hundred times. Their goal was always to return to Coach the next day doing perfectly whatever he had taught them.
The boys had different ways of learning. If Tom showed Dinesh how to throw one kind of fastball, one kind of curve, and one kind of changeup, he would throw those three pitches until his arm fell off. Rinku was more of a trial-and-error type. He wanted to learn every pitch in existence, asking about forkballs and knuckle-curves and exotic stuff like that. He played around with God knows how many different kinds of pitches until finding the three that worked for him.
But there was no doubt about it, both of them worked like dogs. Doing whatever Tom asked them to do, exactly the way he told them to do it, they were committed 1,000 percent. They weren’t robots, though. Dinesh and Rinku were humble but smart. They proved their commitment by engaging intellectually in the project before them. Whenever Coach discussed a certain aspect of their game or baseball in general, they were inquisitive, asking questions that showed that they were taking in and analyzing these new concepts, even with their limited English.
There wasn’t one single day when those guys didn’t do everything in their power to succeed. When Rinku cut one of his fingers with a steak knife (even though he wasn’t eating steak), it was deep enough to put him out of commission for a couple of days. Tom thought that taking a few days off to regroup physically was actually a blessing in disguise, but Rinku was pissed about it.
“You know, I once slammed my hand in the car door and had to pitch the next day,” Tom told Rinku in an effort to cheer him up.
“How did you pitch?” he asked.
“I pitched like shit. But I always pitched like shit.”
Nothing, not even a funny story from Coach, could console Rinku, who announced he was boycotting all metal silverware. And he kept true to his word, using only plastic utensils for three months. Nothing was going to keep him and Dinesh from putting everything toward their goal of doing the best they could at the November MLB tryouts.
* * *
Luckily, they didn’t have too many inherent distractions. Women, the downfall of a lot of guys in training, weren’t on their radar. And, during the time that the boys and I lived together, women weren’t on my radar, either. My Indian The Odd Couple arrangement put a severe crimp in my romantic life. Bringing a girl back to the house where Rinku, Dinesh, and Deepesh were on the couch watching baseball was more than awkward. It was just weird. So, following my unintended vow of chastity in India, I endured another dry spell for the better part of a year in LA.
They didn’t so much as stop to ogle the gorgeous female USC students who used the pool we had to walk by every day to get to Dedeaux Field. (Although double their age, I may have snuck a peek from time to time.) Not even California girls in string bikinis, tanning around the pool where the swimming and diving teams trained, could turn their heads. Well, Rinku and Dinesh may not have noticed the girls, but at a certain point, the girls noticed them. While they walked past the pool one day, two bathing beauties waved and called out, “Hi, Rinku and Dinesh!”
The guys froze, holding their equipment bags. No one said a word. Finally, the girls started to giggle. So the guys started laughing, too. A few more awkward moments passed before the guys wrapped up the sum total of their flirtation and continued on to practice.
That kind of single-mindedness paid off. By the middle of August, both of the guys had hit 90 miles per hour on the radar gun. But throwing hard isn’t always the same thing as pitching well. They still made tons of mistakes. It was very hard for them to both throw hard and also pitch accurately.
There wasn’t any magic moment where either Dinesh or Rinku turned the corner. They just executed the same drills over and over and over until muscle memory started to take over. They quizzed themselves on the same rules again and again until the answers started to stick. Slowly but surely, there were fewer surprises and more quality pitches.
In September they started to pitch in a way that hinted at a professional future in the sport. Once they both began to get a handle on controlling their pitches, I was thrilled to discover that both of them were able to get opposing batters out.
There’s a funny thing about pitchers at all levels: some guys throw really hard and look unhittable in the bullpen but have trouble putting batters away in game situations. And then there are the other guys who look like they throw nothing but meatballs but still manage to get results. Throwing strikes is the part of pitching that is more of an art than a skill. It’s an innate ability you can’t really teach. And for a lot of guys, it’s the X factor that determines success or failure in their careers. It’s like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous opinion regarding pornography: it’s hard to define, but “I know it when I see it.” Pitching is the same way.
From the start, Dinesh had a few advantages over Rinku, including more strength and a simpler pitching motion. (Back at their college, Dinesh had been the better javelin thrower, too.) But of the pair, it was Rinku who showed signs of gaining control over his pitches first, in July, with Dinesh not far behind.
I had been working at my plywood desk, trying to ignore the bad streak that Rinku seemed to be stuck in. Out of my peripheral vision, though, I could see every time he hit a batter. He had nailed something like five batters in a row, testing my acting powers as I tried to pretend like it was no big deal. All of a sudden, there it was: the clean thwok! of a curveball hitting smack in the middle of the catcher’s mitt for a strike.
Over the summer, the number of batsmen hit had begun to dwindle and were replaced by strikeouts. By September, both boys had their fastballs working, but this beautiful, looping curveball looked to the hitter like it fell off a table. It had been heading high and inside but then broke quickly and hard, dropping right over the plate for a called strike that left the hitter frozen. That was the start of an unfolding of talent that both Rinku and Dinesh experienced like two baby chicks, beginning to crack the shell.
I’m not a scout and don’t pretend to be one, so I don’t care how hard a guy throws or what kind of action he has on his pitches. The only basis I have for judging pitchers is whether or not he get outs. Finally, we had something tangible to build upon.
Dinesh’s and Rinku’s mechanics were far from perfect, but they could both get hitters out. They had an innate ability, the art that can’t be taught. As they learned to pitch—not only the muscle memory but how to read a batter’s intentions in his body language—their natural ability was intensified and amplified.
Others recognized this ability in the boys as well—including star players who came to the USC campus. One of those was pitching great Randy Johnson, one of Tom’s guys and a USC grad. At the time, Johnson was forty-five years old and heading into his twenty-second and final season, on the verge of three hundred career victories. Early in his career, the gangly Johnson had great difficulty maintaining correct mechanics consistently and was extremely wild.
He was also a big left-hander like Rinku. I mean six-foot-ten big. He had a lot of good pointers for Rinku, who was six-two at the time. Randy passed along tips on how to use the whole body when pitching to avoid getting injured. “You can’t focus too much pressure on just your arm and your shoulder,” he advised. “Your legs and core are critical to generating power and speed.”
Randy also shared some words of encouragement, reminding both Rinku and Dinesh what I had told them in the beginning, that there are plenty of guys who play baseball for years and don’t make it to the majors. “It’s not about how long you’ve
played,” he said. “What matters is how focused you are and how much heart you have.” Well, if it was about heart and focus, there weren’t two players anywhere in the country who had more than these two guys.
“But most of all,” Randy said, “listen to Coach House.” Nobody was going to quibble with that advice.
The other pro player who made a big impression on the boys was another veteran, Chan Ho Park of the Dodgers. At the age of twenty, he had made history in 1994 by becoming the first Korean to play in the major leagues. Similarly, Rinku and Dinesh were trying to become the first players from India. They were impressed to learn that after having led his country to victory at the Asian Games in 1998, the South Korean government waived Chan Ho’s mandatory three years of military service—a first for a country that takes its army very seriously. The exemption enabled him to continue pitching for Los Angeles.
Having gone on to play for the Texas Rangers, San Diego Padres, and New York Mets, Chan Ho had many important insights to share on what it meant to be the first person from your country to play in the majors.
There are a lot of advantages to being first. There’s more media attention and endorsements. And if you’re doing well, you feel like you have an entire country behind you. But there is also a burden, he said. “Your smallest victories look like mountains, but your defeats look like deep valleys. Everything is exaggerated.”
It’s hard enough for any player when he fails on the field. But as the first Korean or Indian player, there would always be an added layer of pressure (or fifty). When you don’t succeed, you can easily feel like you’re not only letting yourself down but also an entire nation.
“You represent your country on that ball field in a way no American baseball player does,” said Chan Ho, who would retire in 2010 with 124 career wins, the most by any Asian pitcher. “Your teammates might be able to get away with stuff that you never could. And you are going to deal with jealousy—anger that you’re getting attention that isn’t being driven by your ability to play. But you’ll also have more people rooting for you than most of your teammates could ever dream of.” It was a unique position that only a handful of other people in the world shared.
Barry Bonds invited us back to hang out at his palatial pad and watch more DVDs of the guys in action. Back in his captain-of-industry-style office, Barry analyzed each batter while Dinesh and I dug into the sandwiches and fruit salad prepared by his chef. But Rinku didn’t touch any of the food. He sat on the edge of his leather chair, watching the magic television, clearly anxious about something. Suddenly he looked at Barry and piped up, “Look, sir! This guy crowding plate.”
Sure enough, the batter attempted to intimidate Rinku and take away the inside part of the plate so that he would throw outside.
“Sir, look! I brush back,” said Rinku, who clearly couldn’t wait to show Barry.
On the screen, Rinku came in high and tight, sending the batter diving for the dirt. Barry let loose a big grin.
“That is how you do it, man,” he said, pointing to the batter, who now kept a healthy distance from the plate. “Now where is he standing?”
“Way back, dude.” Rinku smiled.
Rinku and Dinesh had become acclimated to much more than just keeping aggressive batters off the plate. Their English had improved enough for Rinku to break it down with Barry. I challenged the guys to learn five English words per day, with the ever-dutiful Deepesh picking out the words for them. But they seemed to glean even more from the movies they watched nearly every night. They enjoyed walking around the house repeating the catchphrases from classic action flicks and Westerns, like “I’ll be back” and “Yippee-ki-yay.”
In addition to watching movies, the boys began to listen to American music as well. After going through all my mp3s, Rinku settled on hip-hop as his genre of choice. And out of all the rappers, his favorite by far was Eminem. Dinesh continued to listen primarily to Indian music but also developed a taste for country, of all things.
With all this “culture,” the boys improved their communication skills to the point that one day when they returned home from practice, Dinesh told me excitedly, “Sir, Rinku saying something to girl today.”
“Oh yeah?”
I pictured Rinku’s mother murdering me in a village honor killing when her son came home with a USC girl.
Rinku, in his best impression of a cool guy from a Hollywood movie, repeated his line: “How you doing, baby?”
The words were right, but it was clear from his affect that to him what was cool was not that he’d spoken to a girl. It was, rather, that he had spoken a phrase from a movie. It would have been all the same to him if he had said to her, “I’ll be back.”
* * *
Music and movies—even Rinku’s adventure around the USC pool—were small diversions from the mounting pressure of the November tryouts. That’s when pro teams start signing free agents, as they put together their rosters for next year’s spring training. As we moved into fall and our rapidly approaching deadline, it was anyone’s guess whether or not Dinesh or Rinku had the stuff to become a pro baseball player.
All pro pitchers have days where they pitch great, and days where they get shelled. All along, throwing 90 miles per hour was our benchmark. We needed Rinku and Dinesh to consistently throw strikes in that range for people to take notice and to accept that Million Dollar Arm was not a gimmick. But Rinku and Dinesh swung so wildly between the two poles of very good days and very bad ones that I got whiplash.
One week they would be throwing almost in the 90s. Then the next week they’d regress back to the mid-80s from overusing their muscles. Tom explained that Rinku and Dinesh would be even more up and down than other guys because of their lack of experience. That may have been true, but with pretty rare exceptions, the difference between throwing 85 and throwing 90 is the difference between going pro and going home.
The deadline loomed, and whether or not Dinesh and Rinku actually achieved their goal, it was clear that everyone wanted them to succeed. Even the USC Trojans, who had to face their speeding fastballs at the risk of losing a body part, were on their side. I couldn’t believe that not a single kid gave Tom any blowback about the threat of getting beaned in the head by one of these foreign nut jobs. Sure, none of them was digging his cleats into the ground when Rinku or Dinesh took the mound. If anything, they were extra light on their feet, but no one refused to take batting practice from them or even so much as complained about it.
As a sort of thank-you and farewell to their teammates, Dinesh and Rinku invited everyone to an Indian-style dinner at our house. The original inspiration came from an Indian company I had done a deal with called Haldiram’s, which makes prepackaged Indian meals. After learning of Rinku and Dinesh, the management at Haldiram’s became big fans and started shipping food to the house. Dinesh in particular was a huge fan of the company’s rasgulla, an Indian cottage cheese dumpling dessert that came in thick, sickly sweet syrup, which Haldiram’s sent in huge industrial-size cans. He loved the stuff so much that one time I caught him guzzling it straight from the can. I nearly gagged at the sight, but Dinesh said blissfully, “This rasgulla is the best.”
Rinku and Dinesh were not world-class cooks, but they were pretty good hosts. They heated up a ton of Haldiram’s meals and then set up the dishes with the meal box tops next to all the plates, so the guests could see the names of everything they were eating. About thirty people filed into our house, now filled with the pungent smells of a huge Indian feast. In addition to the USC baseball players, Tom House and Barry Bonds were there, as well as some pros who were training with Coach, including Ian Kennedy, then a young right-hander with the Yankees, and Casey Daigle, who’d pitched for the Arizona Diamondbacks. Superscout Ray Poitevint joined us, too. We all made our way down the long line of chicken tikka masala, saag paneer, biryani rice, lamb vindaloo, vegetarian meatballs called malai kofta, aloo gobi (cauliflower and potatoes in a spicy tomato sauce), dal, and fluffy naan bread.
It was clear that Dinesh and Rinku were thrilled at the opportunity to share their food and culture with everyone who, for the last six months, had shared theirs. They excitedly led their guests over to the table to explain where the various dishes were from in India and which were their personal favorites. I can’t say that everyone liked the food. Indian is an acquired taste, particularly for guys whose idea of exotic cuisine is Cool Ranch Doritos, but everyone at least gave it a try. How could they say no to some goopy dark-colored sauce and mystery meat when Rinku and Dinesh had put themselves out there, trying countless new things every day that were, in turn, frustrating, humiliating, hard, and physically painful? What was a little saag paneer in the face of all that?
Watching Rinku and Dinesh work the room, I was struck by how well they represented their country—and not just because of one dinner. In addition to attempting to do the impossible by learning a foreign sport well enough to play it professionally in less than a year, not a day went by during their stay in America that they didn’t have to explain an aspect of their culture or clear up an incorrect preconceived notion. No matter how many times someone said something dumb, like, “Why aren’t you wearing a turban?” or “How come you’re eating meat? I thought all Indians are vegetarians?” they never lost their cool. I wanted to clock the umpteenth reporter who asked, “What is your slum like?” But not Rinku and Dinesh. Their deep integrity and confidence allowed for great generosity in the face of silly stereotypes and willful ignorance.
In their own small way, they were really great cultural ambassadors.
As I tucked into my own plate that Dinesh had brought to me, I was reminded of the original impetus behind Million Dollar Arm. Sick of working with spoiled young athletes who weren’t appreciative of the talent with which they’d been gifted and the unfathomable money and opportunities afforded to them because of it, I went out in search of those who would understand the value of ability, effort, and relationships. While the jury was still out on Rinku’s and Dinesh’s pro baseball careers, I could not have found two finer young men. On that basis alone, Million Dollar Arm was already a success. For the first time in my life, I was proud of someone other than myself, and it felt good.
Million Dollar Arm Page 11