Making My Pitch

by Ila Jane Borders

  My love life was a sorry contrast to many of my teammates’, who seemed so carefree about their heterosexuality and showed little restraint in enjoying themselves. The groupies who chased after them seemed to feel much the same. After a night game in Sioux City, a girl who had way too much to drink stood by our team bus. No guy had picked her up, so she opened her blouse, pushing her breasts against the bus window. It is hard to erase a memory like that. I think a rookie finally ended up going home with her. I never did get over how crazy the girls were for these guys. All I could think was, If you only knew how many times they do this in every town.

  One teammate had such smooth moves that he got a girl almost every time we went out of town. We reaped the rewards of his talent. It went like this: On the road he would find a girl the first night we got in and make it known that his birthday was the next day. Invariably the team got his birthday cake. In each town, we would wonder what birthday gifts he would get this time. One woman gave him a watch, but we still got the birthday cake. You would think this guy would have a warped sense toward women, but he was one of the nicest to me. Before games, he made sure to bring me a piece of cake.

  On another road trip, we were in Thunder Bay, Ontario, staying at a hotel with a beautiful location on the water, though it was old and smelled musty. Coming back from dinner downtown, I was walking to my room when I heard some crazy noises down the hall. The floors creaked, so I tried to tiptoe past without looking because I had figured out what was going on.

  But I had been spotted, and I heard the call, “Hey Ila, look at this!”

  The doors were wide open to showcase it all—I guess the hotel knew to keep the ballplayers on one floor, so the other guests would not complain. One guy was behind a woman having sex with her, another was in front having sex with her. Two other guys were cheering her on. The girl was smiling. I swear: if I had been straight, this sort of stuff could have turned me gay. To be one of the guys, I gave a quick thumbs-up, fled to my room, and escaped into the book I was reading.

  Living in the closet surrounded by rampant sex was one kind of stress. More universal was the physical stress of playing baseball day after day. You want some meat on you to see you through the season. Even though 140 pounds is pretty solid for a girl, it is underweight for a guy. Many people think I weigh 115 or 120, but that’s usually because I’m standing next to a six-feet-two-inch, two-hundred-pound teammate. I have no problem, however, eating like someone that size. During the season, I tended to consume lots of the leftovers from the game—an entire pizza, hamburgers, pasta, and an occasional beer (being cheaper than wine). Oh, and I loved my Snickers bars. I was always hungry. The joke was that if someone asked where I was, the reply went like this: “She is probably stuffing her face somewhere.” But I had to eat like this to keep my weight up. The extra weight also kept my stamina up. I figured I’d enjoy eating that way as long as I could.

  Game Day: Seventh Inning. As I sit in the dugout with the Dukes carrying a two-run lead into the seventh, I continue to distract myself with the thought that I am having the best season of my professional career. I have a win and twelve scoreless innings going. Coming into this game, my ERA is 4.88, which puts me in the middle of our pitching staff. I am now in the rotational mix of things: a starter. My confidence is up. I’m also getting along well with everyone—I am a part of this crazy team.

  I watch as Narcisco Febles, a Dukes left-hander like me, runs out to the mound from the bullpen. As Forry Wells walks to the plate I want to be out on the mound so bad. Febles strikes him out. Sweet. But then Ruben Santana hits a line shot down the right-field line for a double. Hell. The next hitter grounds to first, and Anthony Lewis tosses it over to Febles, who runs to cover first for out number two. Santana’s now on third on a fielder’s choice. Then Smith grounds out to first, and the runner dies on third. Cool, three more outs and no runs.

  When Febles comes into the dugout, I bump his fist, and say, “Good job, man; nice pitching.”

  Our hitting coach tells our batters to take more pitches and make the pitcher work for it. For the Dukes it’s been one-two-three innings since the fifth. Now Brito fouls out, Schmitz strikes out, and Lewis flies out to center. We took more pitches, but it was still a one-two-three inning.

  Eighth Inning. Back on the mound, Febles walks Chad Akers. Febles’s pitches are all over the plate: four straight balls. Then Hine doubles to left center, and Chad comes around to score. With Hine sitting on second, George yanks Febles and brings in our closer. I still think we have this. Emiliano Giron strikes out the next batter. Yes. Next batter up hits a grounder to Hine at second, who bobbles it, then rushes and throws the ball away. All during the game the infield has been bobbling balls. Hine scores on the error, tying the game at 2–2, and with it goes my chance for another win. But Giron gets Coste to ground into a double play and we get out of the inning. When Giron comes into the dugout he chews out Hine for the error. He has more seniority, so people listen to him. He’s pissed. For one he wants to beat this team—we all do—but he also understands how much another win would have meant to me. He comes by, slaps my leg, and we watch as the Dukes once again go three up and three down. Our bats have gone dead, and we know we only have Giron left for one more inning.

  Ninth Inning. Giron goes out there again and deals. The RedHawks have a one-two-three inning, too.

  Tenth Inning. Extra innings and I’m still on the bench, waiting to see what’s going to happen. Our bats stay silent once again, and with Fargo’s number nine, one, and two hitters coming up, Ariel Hernandez is sent to the mound. He walks Cory Smith. Shit. Then Akers gets a bunt single, advancing Smith to second with no outs. Next hitter, Hine, bunts down the third base line. He’s thrown out at first but gets credit for a sacrifice for advancing the runners to second and third. Next hitter up, Knott is intentionally walked. Bases loaded, one out, and Fink is up. It’s lefty versus lefty, Hernandez’s specialty, and he strikes him out. The stands are going nuts, and so are both benches. Base loaded, two outs, and Chris Coste is up. Last time I struck him out, and he slammed his bat on the ground. He steps to the plate as the crowd chants, “Coste, Coste, Coste.” Ariel’s fastball comes straight into his wheelhouse, and Coste connects. Hometown guy wins the game with a walk-off grand slam.

  As we Dukes trudge off the field, my teammates come by to say, “Good job, Ila. You pitched an awesome game.”

  The RedHawks designated hitter, Darryl Motley, comes over to say “Nice game.”

  And here comes Doug Simunic, the RedHawks manager who complained about my playing to the league and blasted me on the pre-game radio show, to say, “Nice game, Ila.”

  Even though I got a no-decision, I still feel like I won.

  I don’t see the 60 Minutes crew leave.

  I went home that night with a pain in my neck and trapezius muscles that I had been ignoring for the past couple of weeks. I reached toward the pain and felt bumps. The following day, I asked Mrs. Lothenbach, the woman I was staying with, if she could look at my neck and back. She said, “Yah, you better get in to a doctor. I don’t know what it is, but it looks like something is trying to come out of your body.”

  Luckily, the next day we were off. I went to our team doctor, who examined me and said that the lumps looked like dead lymph nodes. They might even be cancerous, possibly Hodgkin’s disease. He would not know until after he removed them and sent them for a biopsy. He wanted to remove them right away. I wanted to know how long I would be out of pitching. Two or three weeks. If I tried to pitch too soon, the stitches could pull out and the wound become infected.

  I was mortified: first, I could have cancer; second, my season might be over just as I was getting into a groove. I was also scared because with no long-term contract, I could be let go at any time. The only people on the club who knew about my surgery were the doc and the trainer, Gabe Gorby. I don’t know whether Gabe ever told our manager. So the doctor numbed the area and made a ten-inch incision on my upper back. As I sat there,
I hoped that one week of taking it easy would be enough to heal the wound before my next start.

  Seven days later, I was to start a game. The stitched-up wound had not healed yet, but a scab had formed. After my bullpen session was done, I rushed to the restroom, changed my bloody shirt, and came back out to pitch. After almost every inning I came back in and changed my shirt, afraid someone would spot the blood. My head was fogged with pain, and I kept worrying, Do I have cancer? I ended up getting rocked over five innings. I had gotten my ERA down, but this was going to send it up.

  I had two more starts to get through, and then I could head home for the winter. But the next two starts went the same way. My ERA doubled over those three games. When the test results came back, they were negative—no cancer! But I was still down because the surgery had demolished the good season I was having. Looking back, I should have waited to pitch. It seems like I have to learn about life the hard way. But the surgery taught me a lesson that is simple but profound: control what you can control and leave the rest to God. It would take years to learn that if I did my best to focus and prepare, and then strove to go beyond what I thought I could do but failed, God wants me somewhere else. It usually turns out better if I make that change. This lesson goes against my basic nature, and I remain challenged by it. The hard part to understand is, when is this adversity a test to see how much you want to succeed and when is it a door being shut in your face for good reason?

  Back in California I sank into a funk. What affected me most was being flat broke. Japan wanted me to pitch over there. I loved their culture, and they treated me well, but felt I would have been too lonely there. Instead I found work as a substitute teacher, janitor, and personal trainer. Kelly helped me out so I could make time to train for baseball. Without her, I could not have made it through to next season. But here I was again, relying on someone else while others my age were starting their careers. I was growing tired of living on a sofa, eating lousy food, and worrying whether I would get the call to return to spring training camp. People around me often said, “Go for it! Go, Ila!” They loved sharing my dream. But I was living with the stress of being broke and was finding it more and more difficult to find the fun in the game while hiding in the closet. I told myself that I would give the 1999 season my best and see how it went.

  7

  Another Team, Another Town

  May 1999, Duluth, Minnesota. When I got to spring training camp I learned that the Dukes had a new manager, Larry See. This was not good news. I had faced See last season, when he was a player-coach with the Thunder Bay Whiskey Jacks. He didn’t like the experience. “Coming up against her is a no-win situation,” he said. “I mean, if you get a base hit you’re expected to off a woman. And if you don’t . . . well, you look like a fool.”

  I hadn’t liked the experience either. See tended to walk around with a scowl on his face and act like he was better than others. Now, at spring training camp, he liked to remind the players (including me) that he hit two home runs off me last year. Asked about his other at bats against me, he mentioned a few infield grounders. He also remembered a strikeout, “a called third strike on a pitch that was a foot outside,” he said. “I thought the umpires in the league gave her a wide strike zone, and others agreed with me.”

  Actually I struck him out twice, though I knew there was no percentage in correcting my manager’s memory. During workouts, I could tell that my presence made See unhappy. We had a communication gap, too. See said he invited me into the locker room when the guys were watching TV, but after I wouldn’t go in, he said, “It’s hard to bring a team together, to bond, when you have that.”

  I don’t remember him inviting me in. I don’t think that was personal, though. See didn’t seem happy to be there. To me, he lacked a sense of humor, a quality that is important in the baseball life. “Two bad outings and you’re gone,” he warned us pitchers.

  I told myself, Control what you can, and let the rest be in God’s hands.

  Our new pitching coach, Steve Shirley, was different from See, empathetic and approachable. “Much of my work with this team has been psychological,” he explained. “Many of these players have recently been cut from affiliated clubs or are fighting back from an injury. They’re not sure of themselves, and in baseball that hurts.”

  Steve’s daughter had played baseball before switching to softball and later attended college on a softball scholarship. “How many young women are going to win a scholarship to play baseball?” he wondered. Perhaps, given what I had gone through, he wished I had turned to softball, too. He had also played ball in Japan. “There’s a term they use over there, genki,” he said. “It means feeling good about yourself. Right now, I don’t see much genki in Ila.”

  I was driving myself nuts trying to adjust to the changes at the Dukes, knowing they could dump me anytime. Here I had been a part of the 1997 championship team and had done well during the past season until the last three games. The guys knew me by now, and we were all pretty close. It was a day-by-day interior battle to keep my spirits up. But Steve Shirley was right: I did not have much genki in me.

  On the chilly night of June 7, we were getting clobbered by St. Paul, which had scored five runs, with twelve hits, off starter Rick Wagner. It got worse after that, and then See called me in to pitch the ninth. Suddenly the lights behind first base went dark for twenty minutes. Call it an omen, because I felt a sense of foreboding as we waited for the lights to get fixed. The mound had always been my territory, my domain, but as I began to pitch I felt completely lost. My fielders behind me seemed to be frozen in place, committing two errors. By the time it was over, I had given up six hits, six runs (three earned), a walk, and a wild pitch.

  In two and one-third innings this season I’d given up ten hits, eleven runs (eight earned), and four walks. Larry See was true to his warning: the next day the Dukes put me on revocable waivers. I stayed up most of the night calling clubs from the Western (Independent) League. On June 10 Bob Gustafson, the Dukes’ general manager, told me that the Madison Black Wolf had acquired my contract. I didn’t want to go there. I would have preferred going to a different league for a fresh start, where nobody knew me. I was sad, scared, and relieved all at the same time. I could feel myself withdrawing, as I had in high school. Right now there was little that was stable in my life. I talked to God but had no flesh-and-blood friend to talk to. I found myself angry at the situation I was in—was this punishment for something? My mindset was so negative that I couldn’t see the move to Madison as an opportunity to grow. I was to catch a Greyhound bus and be ready to pitch the next night, until I caught a ride with the woman who would become my coauthor. “That’s hard, riding the bus all night and going right into a game,” Jean said. “Why don’t I drive you?”

  Bob Gustafson looked relieved. He handed me a fifty-dollar bill from his cash box, and we headed toward the I-94. During the three-hundred-mile drive to Madison, Jean and I munched popcorn and swigged mineral water as we analyzed the complications of my baseball life. It was a relief to talk it out with someone who shared the common language of baseball. My nerves began to calm down. I had found it hard to keep up much with friends while I was playing ball. Maintaining a good friendship takes time, which I had little of, and requires give and take, a skill I had yet to learn. Right now it was all about me and my career. On that drive we also talked about religion. Jean was a Christian but much more liberal than the ones I had known growing up. She was not shy about pointing out what she saw as the Religious Right’s deviations from Christ’s teaching and example. “Do you really think Jesus gives a rip whether a woman should play baseball?” she asked me. “Isn’t how you play, how you conduct yourself in whatever arena you’re in what he’d be interested in?” Jean had a good friend, a devout Christian, who had recently come out as a lesbian. She had seen what it had cost her friend professionally and spiritually—the local evangelical church she attended had cut her off. Jean said she thought it odd—weird, really—that su
ch Christians were so paranoid about what other people did in bed. I listened but didn’t say anything. As far as Jean knew, I was into guys.

  When I got to Madison I checked in at Warner Park, nicknamed the Wolf Den. I saved what was left of Bob Gustafson’s fifty dollars for meal money rather than a hotel room. I called a friend from Whittier College, Trish Van Oosberee, whose brother lived in Madison, and asked for help finding a place to live. I had mastered sleeping in the car, on a friend’s couch, and on the beer-soaked floor of the team bus, so my first night in Madison was spent on the cushioned stretching table in the smelly and chilly locker room.

  In the clubhouse the next day, I encountered one of the greatest baseball characters I’d ever met: the Black Wolf manager, Al Gallagher. We players thought he was known as “Dirty Al” not because of his language, which was just normal baseball profanity when he got upset, but because of the odor of onions that always seemed to exude from him. Dirty Al’s hair was uncombed, his cap was on cockeyed, his uniform was rumpled, as if he had slept in it, and his socks were pushed down. But his nickname actually went back to his college days. Being highly superstitious, he determined not to shower or wash any part of his uniform while a good streak continued. His was not the orthodox look of a baseball man, and my first impression was to wonder how I could take anything he said seriously. But Dirty Al smiled at me, and the hitting and pitching coaches seemed excited I was there. Meeting them was a good icebreaker, a welcome introduction to my new team. Al said, “How do you feel about starting today?”