by Mike Murphey
Hugh stared hard into Conor’s eyes.
“The thing about talent . . . you’ll find all kinds of people who only care about your talent and don’t care about you. Any number of people will want a piece of your ability. And the most important thing you can do is develop a trust and belief about yourself—about things you feel. This is your life we’re talking about. If you feel Cañada is the right place, then go and don’t look back. It’s up to you now. Not me or anyone else.”
“Mr. Knight?”
Jack Knight, CSM’s head coach, glanced from his desk and offered a smile.
“Conor, it’s good to—”
“I’m sorry, sir,” Conor said. “I appreciate that you want me to play here . . . but I’m not comfortable with my decision. I know you’ve got a great program and . . . I know . . . I’m sorry. I can’t be here. I just can’t.”
Knight stared at Conor for several seconds, then asked, “Where will you play ball?”
“Cañada. I know everyone there and—”
“Conor, you’ve got talent. You’ve got a real future ahead of you. You should make the most of your opportunities. The best opportunity for scouts to find you is here. Cañada isn’t—”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Knight. If I’m good enough, they’ll find me wherever I am.”
That evening, Conor again sat at his kitchen table.
The phone rang. His mother answered.
“Hugh, phone’s for you.”
His father strode into the kitchen.
“Yes . . . yes, and I appreciate that you offered him an opportunity . . . Yes, it might be a mistake. Everybody knows how good CSM has been . . . Okay, okay, look. Here’s the difference between you guys and Cañada. If Conor was still the average pitcher he was in high school, he could’ve walked on at Cañada, and gotten an opportunity to compete for a job. Without a ninety-mile-an-hour fastball, though, you folks wouldn’t have given him the time of day . . . No. It’s his decision, not mine.”
eight
I understand that a person needs an ego to succeed in a competitive situation. And as a nineteen-year-old phenom, Rita, I had plenty of that. I was lucky, though. I understood I owned no real claim to my talent. The ability to throw a baseball at warp speed, or hit it four hundred feet, is a gift bestowed by genetics and happenstance—or some stupid angel.
I’ve seen so many young men enter pro ball wearing a sense of entitlement. At their high schools and their summer leagues, they’d always been the best. Their gift set them a notch above, earned them admiration and deference. Eventually, of course, they learned, at the professional level, their gift wasn’t as unique as they believed. And it’s a hard, hard lesson as they get weeded out. They never understood that ascending to the next level requires grueling, grinding work with which lesser mortals had been cursed all along.
Cliff Holland, a left-hander, held every pitching record at Cañada. He’d been drafted, and by the time I got there, served at some minor league outpost. I’d held him as my role model since junior high school. During my first week at Cañada, head baseball coach Lyman Ashley asked me about my goals. I told him I wanted to break all Cliff Holland’s records.
From that moment, Ashley held the lever he needed.
Behind the campus, beyond the athletic fields, stands a hill—a long, rising grassy slope—the jocks call Mount Vial, named for a past Cañada football coach who hammered his players into shape by running them to the top and back.
Ashley offered pitchers that example as an extracurricular activity.
“Remember, boys,” he said, “you pitch with your legs.”
I accepted the challenge.
“How many did you run today?” Ashley asked me as I sat sweating and panting at my locker.
“Five times.”
“That’s good. But remember, son, a baseball game has nine innings.”
Soon, I was making that round trip nine times.
Until Ashley asked, “What if we go extra innings?”
I added a tenth. And I swore that was it. Then Ashley said, “I’ve seen Cliff Holland do twelve.”
I finally met Cliff when I was inducted into Cañada’s Hall of Fame in 2013. By then, of course, he knew I was the guy who’d surpassed him in Cañada’s record books. I thanked him for the motivation. I told him chasing his records helped me improve—that and running Mount Vial.
“Mount Vial?” He didn’t seem to understand my reference.
“Yeah, when Coach Ashley told me how many times you ran the mountain, I knew I had to do it, too.”
Holland laughed and shook his head. “I hate to tell you this, Conor. I never ran the damn mountain. Not even once.”
1975
During their first season at Cañada, things occurred pretty much the way A.J. predicted. Conor and the Walnut Tree guys did, indeed, take the program to new heights. The College of San Mateo no longer stood as the only JC program big city newspapers wrote about. More significantly, Lyman Ashley found the current crop of high school seniors, including several kids he previously had little hope of recruiting, were expressing interest in playing baseball at Cañada.
CSM and the community of San Mateo, which abutted San Carlos, owned this territory. These were their recruits, their kids who were being spirited away. Conor became a focus of irritation among locals who felt he’d forsaken home-town loyalties just as his skills blossomed.
None of that mattered to Lloyd Christopher.
Conor intrigued Christopher, a veteran California Angels scout, when he watched Conor throw the knuckle curve as a high schooler. Not that a knuckle curve impressed Christopher. Professional hitters would demolish that pitch.
He saw an undersized kid who, despite his limitations, found and mastered a vehicle that kept him alive—for the time being. This kid manufactured a way not only to survive, but to thrive with mediocre stuff. The knuckle curve worked because he also teased his below-average fastball at the edges of the strike zone.
And the thing about skinny kids who kept their heads above water with knuckle curves and mediocre fastballs? They learned how to pitch. Christopher counted plenty of professionals who threw the piss out of the ball but never learned how to pitch. Competing at the professional level is all about adjustment. Hitters improve. Fastballs fade. Pitchers who endure are the creative ones, those who learn early to find that next something, securing a few more games, a few more months, a few more seasons of survival.
The other thing about skinny kids, Christopher knew, is they didn’t stay skinny forever. And every once in a long while, you combined a kid who learned how to pitch, with a body that finally flowered to bear the fruit of a genuine fastball, and you discovered you’d struck gold.
And, oh yeah, the kid’s left-handed.
So, during Conor’s first season Lloyd became a regular at Cañada baseball games, sitting alongside Hugh and Brad, watching the fastball mature. Lloyd didn’t concern himself about competition from other scouts and other teams. He knew how their report on Conor would read.
While his fastball is impressive, his breaking ball needs work—the knuckle curve didn’t factor into that equation, because now that Conor threw hard, his velocity simply overpowered the two-fingered push. Scouts were inherently skeptical of little guys who threw hard, because small bodies were prone to breaking down under long-term stress. And, the other scouts would point out, he is racking up numbers against a bunch of junior college hitters who’ve already reached the pinnacle of their careers.
The other scouts would look at bigger guys first.
So, Lloyd often had the ballpark to himself as he watched Conor go eight and one while Cañada won twenty-five games and reached the Northern California regional finals.
“Connie, wanna hear something funny?” A.J. asked. “Go listen to Lloyd Christopher trying to cultivate your dad. That’s kind of like trying to cultivate a brick wall.”
Hugh and Lloyd sat on metal bleachers, absently watching mini-camp workouts for the Palo Alto Oaks, the
summer team for which both Conor and A.J. had agreed to play following their second season at Cañada. Lloyd, though, wanted to ensure Conor would not be available.
The Angels selected Conor Nash in the fifth round of Major League Baseball’s January supplemental draft. Negotiations between Hugh and Lloyd became more intense with each game Conor pitched during his sophomore season. Conor produced a spectacular 10-0 record. He K’d at least fifteen hitters every start. And when he’d set a school record by striking out twenty-two a few weeks ago, Hugh smiled at Lloyd and said, “I believe the price just went up.”
The two men shared an animated exchange of point, counterpoint. As Conor, A.J., and other players finished raking the infield and tarping the mound and plate areas, Conor drifted toward the discussion.
“The money’s not what’s important, right now,” Lloyd said. “You have to understand that, Hugh. The important thing is getting him on his way. The money will be there. Major League salaries will only get bigger.”
“The money’s not important?” Hugh said. “Not important to who? The guy who owns the team? I’ll tell you, for damn sure, it’s important to us. Conor’s got options. He doesn’t have to sign with anyone. He’s got plenty of bids from major colleges. And a lot of them are offering more than you are.”
“Colleges can’t—”
“Oh, come on, Lloyd. This is the real world. You and I both know they can, and they do.”
True enough.
Lyman Ashley told Conor he’d gotten inquiries about Conor from all over the country. “We’re getting more calls about you than I’ve ever gotten about anyone. You can get a full ride practically anywhere.”
A full ride, and all the little extras it included, sounded good to Conor.
For Hugh, though, university offers represented bargaining chips.
“Maybe getting an education would be a good thing—” Conor suggested.
“For a lot of people, yes,” Hugh told him. “Not for you. I find it difficult to believe you’ll take getting an education seriously at a place where they’ll do everything for you, as long as you’re pitching well. College programs aren’t about developing players. They’re about preserving coaches’ jobs. It’s just a two-year delay getting your professional career started.”
Of course, Hugh would never admit that to Lloyd Christopher.
Hugh initially set the price of Conor’s signature on an Angels’ contract at $50,000.
“Hugh, that’s crazy,” said Christopher. “We gave our supplemental first-round pick a $25,000 signing bonus. And Conor is a fifth-rounder.”
“He’s only a fifth-rounder because you guys didn’t have second or third-round picks. So, he’s actually on a par with a third-round choice,” Hugh argued.
Christopher offered $8,000, and throughout Conor’s sophomore season, the scout didn’t budge.
During the last week of May, Conor prepared himself to pitch the Palo Alto Oaks’ season-opener the coming Sunday, when Lloyd called. Conor heard Hugh’s half of the conversation.
“Lloyd, I’m tired of this. We’re getting nowhere. Don’t insult us with an $8,000 offer again. If you call one more time and there’s not more money—and I mean a lot more money—on the table, Conor will never sign a contract with the Angels. He’ll go play college ball, or we’ll wait a year, and other teams will get their shot.”
On May 30, 1976, Lloyd made a new offer. Hugh, Lloyd and Conor sat at the kitchen table as Conor scribbled his name to a contract paying him a $30,000 signing bonus. He would report to the Idaho Falls Russets—the Angels Class A representative in the Pioneer league.
While they shared congratulations, Conor smiled broadly as he told his dad, “The great thing about this? I can still pitch against San Mateo Sunday.”
Lloyd shook his head. “No, Conor. We’ve given you a lot of money. We don’t want you to get hurt playing amateur baseball a week before you report.”
Conor’s face fell as he turned and offered a silent plea to his father.
On Sunday, Conor and the Palo Alto Oaks would face the College of San Mateo’s summer league team. For two years, as Conor and his friends dominated the Camino Norte Conference, CSM had done the same in the California Central Coast Conference.
For two years, Conor and Hugh read newspaper accounts of the California Coast Conference’s superiority. Hugh suffered jibes from friends and neighbors who, still smarting from Conor’s defection to Cañada, suggested Conor might not be doing so well if he’d chosen a more competitive conference. Conor hadn’t faced CSM during the two years of his JC career. Sunday’s game was his chance to erase the skepticism.
Hugh told Lloyd, “The boy wants to pitch Sunday. He needs to pitch this game.”
“Hugh, we can’t do it. It’s out of your hands. He’s signed a contract. We can’t jeopardize—”
“The contract is still sitting on my kitchen table. I can tear it up as easily as I can let you leave here with it.”
“Oh, come on. It’s one game. He’s got a whole career ahead of him.”
“You’re right,” Hugh countered. “It’s one game. Let him pitch it.”
Lloyd closed his eyes. “Hugh, find your son an agent. Because next time I negotiate his contract, it won’t be with you.”
He turned to Conor and added, “You just be damn sure you don’t break your arm, or anything else. And, Hugh, I hope you enjoy your game.”
My dad, though, didn’t see me pitch that Sunday. My dad would never see me pitch again.
Conor drank. He felt a chill of regret sweep through him. If he could have done one thing different, he wouldn’t have bought that damned car.
Thirty thousand dollars! How could anyone even begin to spend thirty thousand dollars? One splurge. That’s all I wanted. Just one splurge. The only car I’d ever had was a fifty-dollar beater my dad provided for high school. The thing used nearly as much oil as it did gas, and all I knew about cars was if you pushed the gas pedal they went, and the harder you pushed, the more exciting they became. That car lasted only a few months. Billowing smoke and making sounds like a whale song, I managed to get it home, but it never ran again.
“I got you a car,” Hugh said, “and now I gotta pay someone to come and tow it away. Last car I get for you.”
Now I had Thirty Thousand Dollars! I suppose angels can’t relate to such blatant materialism, but my dream was a Starsky and Hutch car. David Starsky, played by Paul Michael Glaser on a weekly television series, drove a bright red two-door Ford Torino with a wide, white vector stripe along both sides. The closest thing I found was an orange Chevy Monte Carlo featuring an off-center brown stripe running along the hood, continuing onto the roof and trunk. I bought it used for $3,500 from a Redwood City kid, who needed money to pay speeding tickets.
I sold it the following November for pretty much the same reason.
“What the hell is that?” Hugh demanded.
“My car,” Conor said.
“Are you crazy? You need a car like you need the measles. You parked the damn thing right in front of the Johnson’s house. You know how pissed he gets—”
“He doesn’t own the street.”
Hugh stared at his second-oldest son and shook his head with disgust. “How long do you think your bonus money will last if you spend it like this?”
“Hey, I got a good deal.” Conor folded his arms across his chest and gazed out the window at his beautiful machine.
“Anything you paid is too much. You don’t need a car. Next week you’ll be in Idaho. It’ll sit here and be an eyesore in my driveway all summer.”
Conor dismissed his father with a sarcastic wave before stomping away.
“And get the damn thing out of the street!” Hugh yelled after him.
The feud still simmered a day later when Conor drove the Monte Carlo to Menlo Park on a perfect Sunday afternoon for the showdown against CSM. A.J. and Brad were still at Conor’s house, pleading with Hugh.
“This is crazy,” A.J. said. “I know Cono
r’s acting like an ass, but it’s his last amateur game. Both of you’ve been looking forward to it for months. And you’re not going?”
“You’re not really gonna make me go watch the game by myself, are you?” Brad pleaded.
Hugh sat at the table, his big arms folded across his chest. “I’m sorry, A.J. I’ll miss watching you play today. I’ll be there the rest of the summer. He’s wrong, though. And he’s got to wake up, or he’ll blow this chance. I can’t validate his actions by going and watching like nothing’s happened.”
“You’re a fucking idiot,” A.J. told Conor. “Your dad should be here.”
A.J. stood at the dugout steps, bat on his shoulder. Conor, who had retired the first three Menlo hitters, two of them via strikeout, leaned against the railing next to him.
Despite adrenaline coursing through him, Conor felt empty. He knew A.J. was right. He should have made peace with Hugh. His dad should be seated with Brad, savoring his son’s crowning home-town performance.
A.J., the Oaks’ number three hitter, stepped to the plate with two gone. CSM’s best pitcher tried throwing a fastball by him. A.J. drove the pitch a good ten feet over the centerfield wall.
Several CSM players were guys from rival high school teams, and they remembered Conor as the corner painter and knuckle curve guy. They discovered a different pitcher living in Conor’s skin. This guy had little use for finesse. He simply blazed three fast balls right past them.
As Conor warmed up, he felt his feet slip in his new spikes. The shoes didn’t fit exactly right. He threw a few pitches, then tapped each toe behind the pitching rubber to adjust the fit.