by Mike Murphey
Of course, I cheated a little there, didn’t I?
Being an angel and all, with more important angel things to do, you probably couldn’t be bothered to keep count. I sought the refuge of cortisone one hundred and sixty-eight times over the course of sixteen years. One hundred and sixty-eight!
So, here’s a toast to cortisone, my blessing and my curse. These injections kept me going long enough to get there, but only until they finally drained the magic you zapped into my left arm before I’d been there anywhere near long enough.
“You started throwing too soon after they injury,” Dr. Jacobs told Conor.
“I broke my ankle. Why does my shoulder hurt?”
Conor’s shoulder pain increased steadily during the month before his reporting date for 1977’s Spring Training. Trainers watched him struggle through his first bullpen session and took him aside.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine. You look like you’ve got a sore shoulder.”
“My shoulder’s tight. I’ll work it out.”
The next bullpen session showed no improvement. Trainers said a cortisone shot might help.
“I don’t want to get shot up,” said Conor. He’d heard stories about pills and injections—training room witchcraft that polluted body and soul—and he swore he would not choose that path.
The organization sent him to Los Angeles and Dr. Jacobs.
“You’re experiencing soreness because you compensated for your ankle and foot tenderness by adjusting your throwing motion,” Jacobs told him. “The ankle’s fine now, so you should be okay.”
“My shoulder still hurts.”
“Cortisone will help.”
“I’d rather just work through it.”
Jacobs peered at Conor over his glasses and shook his head. “Take off your shirt and sit here.”
The doctor stood behind him and probed Conor’s shoulder.
“Hurts here?” he asked jabbing a finger into tender flesh.
“Yes,” grunted Conor.
“Here?”
“Uh huh.”
Next came a sharp jab, then a tiny, focused flow of heat.
“Ow! What was that?”
“A cortisone injection,” Jacobs said. “You’ll feel better soon.”
When Conor began an angry protest, Jacobs cut him off.
“You’re a professional, son,” he said. “Your employers aren’t paying you to work through it. They’re paying you to perform.”
I left the doctor’s office feeling betrayed. Not for long, though, because that shot produced a miracle. My shoulder pain disappeared. The ball jumped from my hand. On that same day, though, someone or something visited us with The Curse.
twelve
Quad Cities Angels
Low A Baseball
1977
“Did you see Jimmy’s bullpen today?” Conor asked Ken Shrom, carefully looking over his shoulder to be sure Jimmy Dial wasn’t anywhere nearby.
“Yeah. He couldn’t find the damn plate.”
The Angels’ minor leaguers finished their final day of spring workouts and packed for their various assignments. The high drama occurred the day before when minor league rosters were posted. Those who hadn’t made a list packed to go home. Among those unfortunates was Goodrum Martin.
Conor felt bad for Goodrum. He didn’t dwell on it, though. He found himself disengaging quickly from those who slipped by the wayside. Conor would not consider the possibility of his own failure. Not for one minute. Not even when his shoulder ached, and his ankle throbbed. He was, after all, chosen.
And sure enough, a solution presented itself at the sharp end of a syringe.
When they entered into their last-man-standing agreement, the fourth pact member, Jimmy Dial, had also been among the chosen. A high-round draft pick, featuring a solid fastball and a big, heavy curve, Jimmy had been Idaho Fall’s most reliable starter the previous year.
Three of the four were bound for Davenport, Iowa and the Quad Cities Angels of the Low A Midwest League. Mark Brouhard, who hit .314, pounding seven homers and driving in fifty-four runs at Idaho Falls, jumped one rung higher to High A Salinas, but Conor, Ken Shrom and Jimmy Dial remained together. Like Conor and Ken, Jimmy wore the label Prospect. Meaning, he figured prominently in the organization’s plans.
The Quad Cities consisted of Davenport—the ballpark location—East Moline, Rockford and Bettendorf. Among the first rituals of any minor league campaign is locating a place to live and roommates to share rent. Outfielder Dave Holland found a house in Bettendorf that fit minor league budgets and invited Jimmy and Conor to join him.
“We’ll each have our own bedroom,” Dave told them. “No one has to share.”
While the house sported an abundance of bedrooms, it did not come with furniture.
“What do we do for beds?” Conor asked.
“What, you’ve never been camping?”
Dave and Conor found an Army surplus store and bought sleeping bags.
Jimmy splurged and purchased a bed.
“Ooooh, Yimmy.”
A soft moan drifted through the closed door of Jimmy Dial’s bedroom.
Conor and Dave, watching television in the living room, glanced at each other with raised eyebrows.
“Oooohhh, Yiiimmy.”
Louder this time.
“Oooooooooohhhhhh Yimmy, Yimmy, Yimmy!”
The volume continued to increase. The next quick series of Yimmies approximated a sort of breathless scream.
“We should get a tape recorder,” Conor said.
Dave turned up the television. Walter Cronkite, though, could not compete with the pretty Hispanic girl Jimmy hosted that evening. And Jimmy hung in there for a good half hour before her Yimmies played themselves out and the bedroom door finally opened.
Conor held his tongue as Jimmy and his date left.
“Way to go, Yimmy,” he said as soon as the front door closed behind them.
If you are a particularly prudish angel—and I have to say Rita sounds like a pretty strait-laced kind of name—I apologize in advance, but sooner or later, we have to broach the subject of sex. Long before pro ball, I knew girls found jocks attractive. Between my stutter and my pitching success, I’d plowed that field several times back home. Visitors to the Nash household saw a wall of photos chronicling the five Nash boys’ relationships. My brothers chose steady connections, and photo after photo over their high school years pictured the same young women. My pictures featured a dozen different companions.
I liked girls, and girls liked me. Although I still tripped sometimes over my t’s and g’s, I was far less self-conscious. And, while I wasn’t the greatest looking kid in the world, I had a gift for making them laugh. And a lot of girls didn’t mind my stutter at all.
“What is it with you and girls?” asked Basil, who remained painfully shy.
“I think they like the stutter. They kind of feel sorry for me. They want t . . . to see if they can fix me.”
Many of these relationships were platonic, but enough of them were not.
One sexual encounter stood paramount in Conor Nash lore and became legendary among my friends. This event occurred during our senior year of high school when I attended a party hosted by A.J.’s father.
A.J. lived in a huge house, complete with a swimming pool, making him the envy of his friends, and Myron Cohen entertained often. A high school girl I’d lusted after for some time attended this party and agreed to her role as lustee. I snuck her into an upstairs bedroom while the festivities proceeded below.
Things had reached a critical stage when the bedroom door opened. Myron Cohen, momentarily taken aback, gathered himself, chuckled, and said, “Conor, m’boy, I’ll give you twenty dollars for a motel room, but not under my roof.”
By the time I reached Quad Cities, I’d conquered my stutter, partly because I no longer needed it. A professional baseball uniform is an even more powerful a
phrodisiac than a minor speech defect. Many of my teammates, young and at their peak of horniness, sought variety. A few, like Dave Holland, looked for love and spent their season with just one girl.
Though not as much of a hound as some of the others, I wanted to get laid like anyone else. My aversion to throwing up, though, meant I didn’t drink as much my friends did. And being sober, for the most part, meant I saw women through more discerning eyes at closing time than did my more well-lubricated associates.
We quickly discovered Davenport featured a nursing school, and the nurses frequented a favorite bar. That’s where I met Karate Girl, an aspiring nurse and part-time karate instructor, tall with a solid build, and clearly not a slave to femininity. I feared she could hurt me if she wanted to. She chose a direct approach. She had early morning classes. If we were going to sleep together, she said, we must do it now.
“Um . . . well, I’m here with my friends,” Conor said. “I don’t have a car . . .”
“I’ve got a car.”
Conor balanced the degree of injury she might inflict upon him in bed, against what she might do if he refused her offer. They drove to Bettendorf and Karate Girl began to disrobe as soon as they crossed the threshold. She removed her bra as they entered Conor’s room.
“Where’s your bed?” Karate Girl demanded.
“Well . . . um . . . I don’t actually have one . . .”
“I am not gonna fuck anyone on a sleeping bag.” She dressed and left. Conor felt he’d dodged a bullet. Until late the next evening when Conor, Jimmy and Dave arrived home from the ballpark.
“Who is that?” Jimmy asked, as our headlights played over a person sitting on the front steps of their porch.
“Oh, my God,” said Conor. “It’s Karate Girl.”
“What’s that against the wall?” Dave asked.
Jimmy said, “I think it’s a bed.”
Jimmy and Dave stayed in the car as Conor approached the porch.
“I’m back,” said Karate Girl.
“Yes, you are.”
“Get the frame, I’ll get the mattress.”
Effortlessly, she hoisted the twin mattress and tucked it under one arm.
Jimmy and Dave waited in the living room, wondering at an ominous series of bangs and bumps. Karate Girl exited twenty minutes later. She did not speak. They cautiously peered into Conor’s chamber, where they found him breathing heavily and awash in a sheen of perspiration.
“Are you okay?” Dave asked.
“That was weird,” Jimmy said.
“Yeah, well, at least I’ve got a bed now.”
Two nights later, rain halted proceedings during the third inning. Jimmy, who hadn’t pitched for days, pleaded for Conor to accompany him to the bar.
“I don’t want to start drinking alone,” Jimmy told him. “I’m afraid I might end up killing myself.”
Passed over for his last two starts, Jimmy worried and fretted over the desertion of his ability to locate a baseball.
“I met a nurse, and she wants to go to the house,” Jimmy told Conor a few moments after they entered the bar.
“Okay, let’s go.”
“It’s not that simple. She has a friend.”
“Oh, come on . . .”
“Her friend says you’re cute.”
Conor tried a subtle lean around Jimmy to check the women Jimmy indicated.
“I don’t know, Jimmy, I . . .”
Jimmy offered a plea. “Come on, Conman, I really need this.”
Conor and his nurse shared the rear seat as Jimmy drove home. As they pulled into the driveway, Jimmy said, “Uh, oh.”
Karate girl sat on the stoop in the glare of headlights. “Crap,” said Conor.
“Is there something wrong?” asked back-seat nurse.
Karate Girl walked toward them. She saw Conor and glared, making a motion for him to roll his window down. “What the fuck is this?” she demanded.
“Um . . . well, I didn’t expect you to—”
“Is she with you?” Karate Girl demanded, pointing at Conor’s nurse.
“Well, sort of, I guess—”
“Give me your keys.”
“What?”
“Your house keys. Give them to me. Now!”
Conor handed over his keys.
“What should we do?” Jimmy asked as they watched Karate girl disappear into their house.
“We should probably wait here, where it’s safe.”
A moment later, Karate girl re-emerged, a mattress under one arm, a bedframe under the other.
“She’s taking your bed,” Jimmy said. “Shouldn’t we stop her?”
“I don’t think so,” said Conor.
“You don’t have a bed?” asked back seat nurse.
Jimmy couldn’t throw a strike.
His decline began innocently enough. At the start of spring workouts, he didn’t hit his spots with any consistency. A fastball intended for the plate’s inside corner drifted to the outside corner, instead. He’d miss high, compensate for the next delivery, and miss low.
“Oh, Yimmy,” Kenny said as he and Conor watched their friend struggle.
Coaches attributed the problem to off-season rust, and sure enough, Jimmy’s control made a brief reappearance. When his location abandoned him again shortly before they broke camp, though, the variation seemed more dramatic. Now, his fastball produced lunging dives and leaps by his catcher.
Trainers probed and questioned Jimmy, suspecting soreness or an injury being hidden from them.
“I actually wish I had an injury,” Jimmy confessed. “Then I’d at least know what was going on.”
By the time he threw his first Quad Cities bullpen, the issue became less whether he could throw a strike than whether his catcher would even reach the ball. No one wanted to warm up with Jimmy. His teammates began treating him as if he suffered some airborne contagion they might contract if they got too close.
Conor volunteer to catch him.
“Let’s start short, like five feet, and work our way back,” he suggested.
They tossed back and forth without incident until they reached sixty feet, six inches. Conor spent the rest of their workout sprinting into the outfield after the ball.
“Okay, let’s try starting far apart and working our way in.”
They set up a hundred feet apart and Jimmy hit his target. Until Conor again reached the distance from home plate to pitching rubber.
Jimmy bordered on hysteria.
“I’ve got no idea what to do. I feel like I’m doing everything like I used to, but the ball goes wherever it wants. It’s like, once it leaves my hand, it’s got a mind of its own.”
“Well, have you tried . . .” Ken Shrom asked.
“Yes! Yes! I’ve tried everything. Some fan who watched me hollered that I should throw with my eyes closed. He said I needed to eliminate any distractions and let my body flow. So, I tried it.”
“Did it help?”
“The guy was standing, like, five rows back and I hit him. Right in the chest. I think he’s gonna sue me.”
A month into the season, the Angels handed Jimmy his release. A guy who’d been a solid starter the previous year had a 1977 season lasting a total of three innings. He allowed three hits, struck out one, and walked twelve. He packed his stuff early in the morning and caught a Greyhound for somewhere in Indiana.
“I didn’t want to say anything while he was still here,” Ken said, “because it’s not something you want to jinx a guy with by saying it out loud.” He motioned Conor closer. “He got,” he paused, looked both directions, and whispered, “the yips.”
“The yips?”
“Shhhhhh. Don’t just say it like that. Yeah.”
“How do you get the . . . those?” Conor asked.
“Nobody knows. It just happens. Happens to more people than you’d think. And there’s no cure.”
We grieved over Jimmy Dial the rest of that day, then let it go. There would be no champagne for Jimmy. Like
Goodrum Martin, he represented a kind of death, something we dared not contemplate. We hadn’t committed whatever egregious sin prompted Jimmy’s baseball angel to scorn him.
We were golden. We would survive anything.
thirteen
Because I continued to experience some shoulder soreness, my manager at Quad Cities used me sparingly. I made a late-inning appearance only every fourth or fifth day. On each occasion, though, Chuck Cottier saw more evidence of the fastball everyone had told him about.
“How are you feeling?” Cottier asked about a month into the season.
“Good,” I told him. “I could use more work.”
Cottier smiled. “Well, I talked with the operations people yesterday. I told them I wanted to give you a couple of starts.”
My face lit up.
“Don’t get too excited. They’re worried about you getting hurt again. They said they like you out of the pen. They see you as a closer. So, you’ll be getting more work, anyway.”
I caught fire. Over my next eighteen appearances, I K’d thirty-nine, with very little finesse. Mostly, I just threw the shit out of the ball.
“Thank God,” said Dave Holland. “I thought we’d never get any rain.”
As a kid, Conor regarded even a drop of game-day rain as tragedy. He remembered sitting on his porch, wearing a uniform, watching puddles deepen, and praying it wasn’t raining this hard three blocks away at the ballpark.
On this morning, though, he, Dave and Kenny were roused from their beds by a peal of thunder. They stepped out the front doors of their adjoining Waterloo, Iowa, motel rooms into a downpour. Cottier made the rounds before noon, informing his minions the night’s game had been canceled. Conor watched Cottier only a few minutes later, twirling a set of car keys, walking across the parking lot, a little skip to his step.
The Quad Cities Angels neared the end of their longest road trip. They’d played twenty-one days straight, and everyone needed a break. They walked a few blocks to a movie theatre, napped, splurged for a nice meal at a restaurant across the highway from the hotel and got a couple of six packs.