by Mike Murphey
Twin pillars of the Salinas economy were agriculture and a few nearby penal institutions. Local motels and bars did a thriving business, serving friends and family members as they visited their beloved felons.
“A.J., I am not going to sleep with someone’s gun moll,” Conor said, unable to resist one more glance. The women waved again.
“Come on,” A.J. said. “Think about it. They’re not looking for a relationship. They already have one or will in two-to-five years. They’re like us. They’re just looking to get laid.”
“Baze will be here tomorrow,” Conor said. “He’ll probably be happy to help out. I’m not going.”
“I already made the date,” A.J. protested. “We’re meeting them at—”
“I’m not going.”
A.J. pouted all night.
Basil arrived the next day. His Alaska fortunes continued to thrive. Brad met him at the San Francisco airport, and they drove to Salinas.
“They’re sending me to underwater welding school this fall,” Basil told them.
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Brad asked.
“They pay me twenty dollars an hour welding on the pipeline. I get my underwater certificate and it’ll be twenty-seven.”
“Yeah, but when you’re welding on the pipeline, at least you can’t drown.”
“And I’m selling my trailer. I’m buying ten acres of land and a house.”
“Land?” A.J.’s ears perked up. “Can you buy twenty acres?”
“I could buy a hundred acres if I wanted to. Alaska has plenty of land.”
“And this is close to the pipeline? Conor, you’ve still got your bonus money. We should—”
“I already told you, A.J., I’m not giving you any of my bonus money.”
“If you guys buy something,” Brad said, “don’t sign a contract until I’ve seen it.”
Conor protected a one-run lead with a popup and two strikeouts.
They chose the Blue Boar to celebrate. They were granted entry only after Conor assured the bouncer that none of his brothers were within eighty miles.
“Okay, where’d Baze go?” Conor asked, returning from the bathroom. A.J. grinned and pointed. Baze sat high on a stool, holding a glass of scotch, a gaggle of women surrounding him.
“And look who it is,” A.J. added.
“Oh, no. The prison girls.”
The women from the previous evening were hanging all over Basil, accompanied by three other tattooed ladies. Conor watched with trepidation as one of them handed Basil a second glass of scotch.
“Brad,” Conor said urgently, “go tell Baze we need to leave. He’ll listen to you.”
His admonition came too late. One of the prison girls tucked herself into Basil’s left arm. The other leaned into a long kiss.
“Thank God, they aren’t local.” Conor scanned the room for angry cowboys as a scowling woman grabbed the kissee by her hair and threw a punch to her jaw. A five-woman melee erupted. Basil stood calm at the epicenter, his scotch raised high, safe above the storm.
“Come on, A.J.” Conor said. “We’ve gotta get him out of there.”
He rushed forward. From his left, he heard someone say, “Hey, here’s one of the assholes who stood us up last night.”
She hit Conor with a chair.
“Come on, Connie, it’s not my fault,” Basil said. “Nobody told me they were prison girls.”
Once again, they stood in the parking lot seeing to Conor’s wounds.
“I talked with the owner,” Brad said. “If you pay for the chair you broke, they won’t bring any charges.”
“I didn’t break the damn chair,” Conor said. “It was . . . uh oh.”
The prison girls approached.
Brad stepped toward them, raising his hands as an offering of peace. The prison girls apologized. “You didn’t tell us you were with Basil,” said prison girl A. “Yeah, we never met anyone from Alaska,” added prison girl B.
“Okay,” Basil said. “Are we good?”
Everyone seemed to agree, except Conor, whose back hurt.
“So . . .” Basil added, “If you guys don’t need me for anything else, I said I’d have one more drink . . .”
Each of the prison girls took one of his arms and guided him toward a car at the far end of the lot.
“Whose gonna pay for the damn chair?” Conor called after them.
A voice wafted from parking lot shadows.
“It’s not my fault.”
I enjoyed a spectacular second half. With the help of a soIid defense over my twenty-three appearances, I recorded forty-one strikeouts and didn’t blow a single save opportunity. I was named to the All-Star teams for both the California and Midwest Leagues.
Stubing shared his end-of-season evaluation report.
“Conman, you don’t have anything left to prove here. You should be closing at triple-A next year. Anyway, that’s my recommendation.”
Triple A! One short step from the Majors.
I spent my off season considering a life pocked with Karate Girls and Prison Girls and bar fights, or a life with Kate. I proposed in December. We married after the 1978 season, about the time my baseball career began to fall apart.
fifteen
Spring, 1978
“W hy am I going back to Salinas?”
Conor might not seek physical confrontation the same way his brothers or A.J. did, but he’d learned his father’s lessons. He wouldn’t just smile and take it. He owned a sharply honed sense of basic fairness. So, when Mitchell Preston arrived at his office at the California Angels Palm Springs spring training facility, Conor waited at his door.
“You’re Conor Nash, right?” Preston asked as he directed Conor inside.
Preston, a tall man with a long face and a high forehead, was the newly minted Director of Angels’ Minor League Operations. Mark Brouhard and a couple of other guys advised Conor against approaching Preston. They suggested he relay his questions through one of the few remaining coaches they knew, like Moose Stubing or Chuck Cottier. That’s not how Conor’s dad would have done it, though. During the winter of 1977-78, Conor deeply felt his father’s absence, particularly in situations when he needed paternal advice.
“Moose showed me his evaluation report last September,” Conor said. “He recommended that I jump to triple-A.”
“Moose doesn’t run the Angels farm system,” Preston said. “I do. I’ll come to my own conclusions. Here’s the thing. You don’t fit our prototype. Little guys who throw hard break down too often. I wouldn’t have drafted you. You’re here, though, and we’ve got an investment. So, do well at Salinas, and you’ll move up. Now, if you’ll excuse me . . .”
In January the Angels had announced a sweeping reorganization of their minor league operations and coaching staff. The administration that drafted Conor was gone, the scouting system restructured. Many coaches who were Conman advocates, including Carlos Estrada, had been fired.
Conor knew his father would want him to stick up for himself. While trying to harness his anger at being summarily dismissed from Preston’s office, he heard his father’s reminder that baseball wasn’t a game anymore. You are a professional. Baseball is a business. And an expectation of fairness is naive.
Salinas Angels
1978
“I don’t know why you’re still here, Conman. As long you are, though, you’re one of my starters.” Chuck Cottier had also made the jump to Salinas. “Improve your curve ball and develop a change-up. We’ll see if Spaldy can help.”
Along with a starting opportunity, the prospect of learning at the feet of the great Wilbur Spalding mitigated Conor’s disappointment. The Hall-of-Famer replaced Estrada as roving pitching instructor under the new administration. Every left-handed child of the 1960s worshipped two idols: Sandy Koufax and Wilbur Spalding, left-handed legends of the game. Spalding pitched until age forty-four. He retired in 1965, followed by election to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1973. Like Conor, he’d been a
rail-thin southpaw when he broke into professional ball. Surely Wilbur Spalding would hold a special affinity for a fellow skinny lefty who threw smoke.
Conor’s happy anticipation of being mentored by Spalding, though, was tempered by his second confrontation with Mitchell Preston.
“Why is my check only five hundred dollars?” Conor asked his manager. “Did I get some kind of pay cut I don’t know about?”
During Conor’s rookie Idaho Falls season, he’d made a grand total of three thousand dollars for six months work. His monthly salary jumped to five hundred twenty-five dollars his second year, and now, his third year, he should be making five seventy-five.
Cottier examined the stub. “I don’t know. Check with the front office.”
“We were directed by Mr. Preston to withdraw seventy-five dollars a month due to an unpaid debt,” the front office lady told him.
“What unpaid debt?”
“You’d have to ask Mr. Preston.”
“We were contacted by a dentist,” Preston told him. “He said you refuse to pay your bill. I won’t tolerate deadbeat employees. Seventy-five dollars will be held from each paycheck until this debt is settled.”
Conor came unglued.
“I didn’t pay the fucking bill,” he screamed into the phone, “because he pulled the wrong fucking tooth!”
Last January, Conor had suffered a toothache. He tried to see his family dentist, who was in Acapulco. His tooth got worse. He found another dentist. Who pulled the wrong tooth. The dentist apologized. He said he’d be happy to try again. Conor did not want a dentist who pulled the wrong tooth anywhere near his mouth a second time.
The dentist sent him a bill for six hundred dollars. The next month, the dentist sent him a second bill, with interest due and a threat to sue.
“Don’t pay the bill,” Brad advised him. “He won’t sue. He doesn’t want everybody to know he pulled the wrong tooth.”
Brad removed his two false teeth. “If he doth thue, we’ll counter-thue and embarrath the thit out of him.”
“Well,” said Preston without a hint of apology, “I don’t know anything about that. All I know is there’s a bad debt and . . .”
“What the fuck gives you the right to pay my bills?” Conor yelled. “You aren’t my father. You don’t get to teach me any goddam lessons. Maybe you can bury me in Salinas, but you damn sure better keep your hands off my bank account!”
Wilbur Spalding arrived three weeks into the season.
“I’ve been told how much all you kid pitchers liked Carlos Estrada,” Spalding said with his Oklahoma drawl. “Well, forget everything Estrada said. I don’t know what his record was. I won 363 games in the Major Leagues, I struck out 2,583 batters and I could still strike out half the hitters on this team.”
Spalding glared as the Salinas pitching staff gathered in. A frown creased his face. His ears were long and his forehead high. Smack in the center of this elongated oval, a bulbous nose lay a little to one side and hooked at the end. A long stem of a neck connected Spalding’s head and shoulders. The word gangly might have been invented just for him. A sportswriter once described him as goose-necked and stork-legged.
Of course, Conor didn’t care how Spalding looked. Spalding’s implied denigration of Carlos Estrada did not sit well. But, hey, the guy’s Wilbur Spalding, right?
His estimation of Spalding fell further a couple of days later as Conor warmed for his fourth start. His first three outings had been solid. His fastball jumped and tailed—he’d already recorded nineteen strikeouts. His curve ball was coming along, the change-up a work-in-progress.
“Your delivery’s not deceptive enough,” Spalding said.
Conor had seen Spalding’s approach. He’d interrupt pitchers mid-workout and advise some sort of significant change of motion, harkening back to days of herky-jerky deliveries with lots of moving parts.
“What I want you to do,” Spalding told Conor, “is extend your right hand, stick your glove right out in front. Yeah, like that. Then, put your left hand by your side, now swing it up to the glove, and then go. And change the number of times you swing your arm. Sometimes do it twice before you pitch, maybe even three times. Okay, let’s see it.”
And right then, Conor realized the unthinkable: he didn’t like Wilbur Spalding. Not because Spalding asked Conor to do something awkward and stupid at a point when Conor should be building focus for his start. Spalding, though, was just . . . unlikable. Which bothered Conor.
How can someone not like Wilbur Spalding? Spaldy the legend. Spaldy the Hall-of-Famer. Spaldy the war hero.
Under Spalding’s penetrating glare, Conor attempted half a dozen pitches using the awkward motion. The first five sent his catcher leaping and diving. The sixth found a corner of the plate.
“There you go,” Spalding said, and headed toward the outfield.
“What were you doing over there,” Brouhard asked Conor as he toweled off his warm-up sweat. “You looked like a swinging door.”
Conor rolled his eyes. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
Conor walked two hitters before he recovered the comfort zone of his familiar compact delivery. He pitched into the seventh for the win, though, striking out six.
Spalding found Conor at his locker.
“I didn’t see any attempt to vary your delivery tonight.”
“No,” Conor said. “What you had me doing was awkward. It’s not something I—”
“Son,” Spalding said, “a kid who won’t listen is what we call uncoachable. You don’t want to be that.”
He walked away.
Despite the growing animosity he and Spalding shared, Conor enjoyed a solid season as a starter. He won six and lost four with a 2.85 ERA. He made twenty-seven appearances, striking out seventy-one.
Mark Brouhard, Conor’s closest friend on the team, flourished. He had a monster year elevating him to the Major’s two seasons later. He hit .310, belting twenty-one home runs and ninety-one RBI.
Each time Spalding’s rounds brought him to Salinas, my recovery—my ability to rediscover the mechanical groove that afforded me success and confidence—took a little longer. And my shoulder hurt.
My growing frustrations with Spalding were set aside, though, when Kate and I married that September. Our wedding took place in the same Catholic Church where I’d been confirmed a dozen years before. A.J., Basil and Brad were co-best men. My brothers were groomsmen, so the line-up standing on my side of the church extended almost to the wall.
As we prepared to walk down the aisle, I turned to A.J.
“Don’t go making any explanations to the priest about being Jewish. And don’t interrupt him to tell him what a good job he’s doing.”
“Don’t worry,” A.J. said, “I already slipped him a twenty. I told him there’d be twenty more if he doesn’t screw it up.”
I should have given A.J. the money. Remember that five thousand he wanted from my signing bonus for his Arizona land deal? A decade later, A.J. sold the land for almost a million bucks.
How was I to guess he actually might know what he was talking about? I mean, A.J. always had some kind of scheme going. When we were kids, he charged girls from my high school a fee for arranging dates with guys from his high school. He printed business cards that read A.J.’s Pimp Service. I didn’t invest in that business, either.
I still don’t know how the deals keep coming. He’s always buying shopping centers or partnering in real estate developments. He’s got a gift of schmooze—he calls it his rap, and no one raps like A.J. I’ve asked him how he does it. I mean, what does A.J. Cohen know about shopping centers? “I don’t need to know anything about shopping centers,” he said. “I speak the universal language—the language of money.”
The other thing I should have done is let him be my agent a lot sooner.
Same problem. How could I know?
You’re not an accountant or a lawyer, I told him when he suggested it. What do you know about being an agent?
Nothing, maybe, he told me. “But I can make deals.”
A.J. is a multimillionaire. Who knows, maybe he has an investment angel who was paying attention the day A.J. nearly got roped into the carpet business.
My dad died right before my twenty-first birthday. So, a year later—December of 1977, the guys hijacked me to Tahoe to celebrate the birthday I’d missed. I was halfway to Sacramento before they told me where we were going. I told them Kate would be worried. They said I could call her from the casino. Which I did.
She was a little irritated.
“Conor, you’re engaged now. You can just go off with your buddies without telling anyone. Let me talk to A.J.”
She reamed A.J. pretty good. “One of these days,” she told him, “you have to grow up. Conor needs to be an adult now, and I’m not sure he ever will be, as long as you’re not.”
I stayed only because Don Rickles was playing at Harrah’s, and because we agreed Baze would not pick up any women, A.J. wouldn’t get sucked into the blackjack tables, and Brad would be sure we followed the rules.
Ha!
Lake Tahoe
“The day we get back, I have to go with my father and brother to a carpet factory, so I can meet our suppliers, start learning everything about carpet.” A. J. had finally succumbed to his father’s pressure to embrace the family business. He displayed an utter lack of enthusiasm for his commitment, moping with the fatalism of a man on death row.
“Well,” Brad said, “maybe it’ll be interesting.”
A.J. sighed. “Believe me, that’s the worst possible outcome.”
They’d been at the casino only a few hours, though, when A.J. brightened.
“Here, Connie, hold onto this.” He shoved a wad of bills into Conor’s shirt pocket.
“Holy, shit, there’s almost a thousand dollars here.”