Imperfect: An Improbable Life

by Jim Abbott

  In the tunnel outside the clubhouse, Tony Kubek, who did Yankees television, asked Showalter about me, and my imprecise August, and what that might mean for September, and Showalter said, “We think Jimmy’s going to pitch very well in September. We need him to. It’s as much wishful thinking as confidence in Jim.”

  Probably just as well I hadn’t heard that then.

  Dana, I knew, would be in her seat in the family section by then, somewhere just to the left of home plate on the field level. These days could be rougher on her than they were on me, and lately they hadn’t been much of a joy for me. And yet, when the anthem was done and my warm-up pitches were done and the baseball eventually came back to me—delivered with a sharp throw and a nod by Wade Boggs from third base—all of that was gone.

  I liked pitching at Yankee Stadium. It was fair for left-handers, even if the fences down the lines crept in closer than I’d like, and I seemed to give up balls down the lines. I had a good feel for the park, and it for me, seemingly. It helped that the grass was high and the field was crowned, the drainage design making it appear Nokes was two or three feet closer than he was in other parks. From that vantage point, it seemed there was nothing behind him but the stands, a different perspective given how quickly the ground fell off behind the plate.

  Banks of lights were on above the top deck even for the afternoon game, and the stadium was about half-filled—both elements reflecting the weather. Mattingly led us out of the dugout and onto the field. The mound was pristine, another attribute of a stadium reborn overnight. The dirt was fresh and almost gummy, but firm just beneath the surface. My own cleat marks followed me to the rubber.

  The recorded voice of the baritone Robert Merrill burst from the speakers in center field. I held my cap to my heart, over the interlocking NY, and I listened to the anthem just attentively enough to know when it was over. My mind was on Kenny Lofton.

  As I took one last look around, I noted the flags were blowing to right field. Short out there. I cleared the small globs of muddy dirt from the rubber with the toe of my right spike, licked my lips, readjusted my cap.

  I squared my shoulders and brought the glove and ball to about chin level, briefly met eyes with Nokes, and looked for his fingers. He wanted a fastball. I knew he would. As I initiated the delivery for my first pitch, I felt the hardness beneath my feet, a pitching rubber that, in twenty-four hours, would be unearthed and delivered to my locker.

  CHAPTER 2

  My first pitch skittered to the backstop.

  Just took my four-seam grip, went into my windup in front of all those people, let go of the baseball and yanked it past Matt Nokes on the glove side. It hit the backstop on two hops, which wasn’t so bad; the wall is back there a good ways and to reach it I knew I must have my decent fastball.

  One pitch in, I’d cleared out the catcher and the umpire, scared the bat boy off his stool, and drawn a light groan from fans still stuffing their ticket stubs into their pockets. Or maybe that was just Showalter, as he was still stuffing the lineup card into his pocket. Maybe he was thinking it wouldn’t be long before I was running through the streets of the Bronx—this time with his permission.

  In that last start against the Indians, I’d left, oh, a pitch or two over the plate. Maybe this was my body’s unconscious effort to correct that. You know, aim for the inanimate objects—pine tar rags, helmet racks, backstop padding, whatever—and reduce the professional risk.

  Kenny Lofton was the batter and in 11 at-bats against me he’d had seven hits. I did the smart thing and walked him on five pitches, which wasn’t so smart because he also led the league in steals. When you walked Lofton it was like throwing a double, because sooner or later you knew he’d be standing right behind you, calling for time and brushing the dirt out of his sliding shorts. All you could do is get the ball back from one of your middle infielders and wait for him to tidy up so he could steal third.

  Six days before in Cleveland, in part because I’d walked four Indians in 3 2/3 innings and in part because of the 10 hits that came with the walks, I’d allowed seven runs, as many runs as I’d given up in a start all season. We’d won only because we scored 11 runs after I’d left.

  The baseball back in my hand, I needed to get my legs under me again. I needed to pitch away from my last start, almost as much as pitching into this one. I needed to get back to throwing strikes and to work to the extremes of the Indians’ bats. After ball one to the next hitter—Felix Fermin—I did gradually find the strike zone, and my legs. I broke Fermin’s bat with a cut fastball near his hands and the weak grounder that spun off his bat became a double play, expertly turned, Wade Boggs to Mike Gallego to Don Mattingly. Carlos Baerga, a switch-hitter who batted left-handed against me to keep the cutters off the neck of his bat, flew to left-center field on the third pitch, a nice cutter down and away he hit off the end of his bat.

  It was good—really good—to have the first inning behind me. I’d been banged around in the media for close to a week, after being banged around by the Indians for better than an hour, after being banged around by the American League for about a month. Every inning, every out, every pitch mattered, even more than usual. It’s not a great way to survive, living on every pitch, but it’s what I had at the moment.

  So, it was with some sense of achievement that I left the mound after what most would consider a fairly routine 11 pitches. In the best of circumstances, an uneventful first inning is nothing more than that, but I arrived in the first-base dugout feeling, I guess, buoyant. In any situation, but mine in particular, I felt like I’d broken the ice, getting through that first inning, getting past that last start, getting through part of the order, throwing a few pitches, getting a feel for Nokesy again. The momentum gathers, confidence starts to build. You know, the first inning is really one of the toughest for a starting pitcher. To get through that without giving up a couple hits or a run, I wasn’t thinking I had it made by any stretch, but there is a bit of settling in, physically and emotionally.

  I took my usual route from the mound to the dugout, took my usual seat (often, for no real reason, near the medical kit), placed my glove beside my left thigh, zipped my jacket to my throat. I checked my shoes, again for no reason. I got new ones all the time. But, the routine of cleaning my shoes with a tongue depressor—come to think of it, maybe this explains my persistent proximity to the medical kit—was my way of letting go of the last inning, good or bad, of clearing my head, a kind of psychological cleansing.

  Funny how the week had gone, all the chatter about whether my pitching had become a hindrance to the Yankees, and whether I might not be better suited for the bullpen, which would have been nothing more than a plan to get me out of the way. As uncomfortable a time as it was, I’d reached a significant place in my life. Since I could remember, I had ached to be just another something. In a sandbox, I wished I could be just another kid on the playground. At a desk, just another kindergartner drawing the alphabet. In a gym, just another point guard learning to dribble with either hand.

  But I wasn’t, and couldn’t ever be. So, I handled the pail and shovel the best I could, and tried not to tear that flimsy grayish paper with the hook at the end of my right arm, and tried to go to my right on the basketball court, and left every situation as the little boy who did very well, you know, considering.

  When I was pretty good on a baseball field—any field, actually—it was thought to be remarkable because, well, look at what the one-handed kid did. As the years and seasons passed, “One-handed-pitcher” might as well have been my first name, as it always preceded “Jim.” So, I came to believe all but one pitcher in the game were judged by the usual standards of stuff and ERA and wins and value to the club, while I was judged on a scale that modified those measurable qualities with the leniency of, “Hey, look at what the one-handed guy did.”

  Now, toward the end of my fifth big-league season, after trying so hard to be great—and therefore a pitcher without modifiers—I’d discovered eq
uality in failure. Oh, the irony. Buck Showalter, the Yankees, the press, New York—they wouldn’t have cared if I spit the ball out of my mouth—so long as I could keep Carlos Baerga in the yard. And, in the speculation as to whether I would continue in the rotation, the question was whether I could get hitters out or not. There was simplicity in that, in a backward kind of way. I’d have preferred a win and I’d have chewed the knob off a bat for a few more miles per hour on my fastball. But it struck me that, going on twenty-six years old, I’d back-doored into exactly what I’d desired my whole life.

  CHAPTER 3

  The journey from Flint to the Detroit suburbs, diagonally across much of the thumb of the Michigan mitt, is fifty miles of Interstate 75, the landscape leafy, flat, and unremarkable. Run it often enough and the neighborhoods lapping against the highway become too familiar to be anything but a couple two-story rectangles in another grove of trees, the occasional child swinging, pumping his legs against gravity in a backyard edged in chain-link. Southbound, the drive bends east through the outskirts of Grand Blanc, Waterford, and Auburn Hills, sags due south past Pontiac to Bloomfield Township, and darts east and then south again to Troy, Birmingham, and Royal Oak, maybe an hour from end to end.

  If, say, one were headed to a hospital in nearby Southfield, Interstate 696 curls west toward Lansing just as you’d start looking for the high-rises in downtown Detroit.

  On a Tuesday afternoon in mid-September 1967, Mike Abbott drove this route as fast as his borrowed silver Chevrolet Impala would take him. His girlfriend, Kathy Adams, lay in the backseat, trying not to be frightened, her eyes urging Mike to please go faster. They’d spent the day in Flint, where she had picked out a wedding dress—a silver-hued shift that cascaded over her belly to her knees. They were eighteen. Kathy was in labor. They’d left the dress behind.

  He was three months out of St. Matthew High School in Flint, six months removed from scoring seven points in St. Matt’s Class D state championship basketball game at the end of a 23-0 season. The year before, she’d graduated salutatorian at St. Agnes High School in Flint. She was pretty and smart, a cheerleader and a member of the Future Teachers of America and Future Nurses of America clubs. He was a strapping football and basketball star, a halfback and a small forward whose teams hadn’t lost a game in either sport all year. She was studying to become a teacher, over on Kearsley Street at UM-Flint, rather than at Nazareth College all the way out in Kalamazoo, where she had a scholarship but wouldn’t have seen Mike often enough. Farther down Kearsley Street, he was roofing the new GM plant, laying large tiles, then paper and hot tar, through a thankfully cool summer, putting money away for Kathy and the baby, then saying good-bye to friends and teammates who went off to play college ball on scholarships he might have had, too. She was two semesters toward a teaching degree, three trimesters into motherhood. They were preparing for a life together, one that had sneaked up on them and which they dealt with out of love and naivety.

  Mike gripped the steering wheel and blew down I-75. He was about to be a father. He would have been a husband, too, in just a couple days, had the baby not come so soon, two weeks early. So he raced into adulthood at eighty miles per hour on the back of that Chevy small-block V-8, counting the mileposts between contractions, Kathy’s moans cutting across the clatter of air that forced its way over the windows.

  This is it, he thought, and clutched the wheel tighter, keeping his hands from trembling. He’d only had a father himself for seven years, and then Joe Abbott had died of a heart attack. Six months before that Mike had a brother, Jim, die in Greece while in the Navy. Everyone who knew Joe was sure it wasn’t the weak heart that killed him, but the grief of losing his eldest son.

  Joe and Frances Abbott had raised their seven children in a three-story Tudor house on East Fourth Street near downtown Flint, a couple hundred feet from one of the three Abbott family-owned meat and grocery stores. Joe was company president. Frances volunteered for many of the charities in town, and doted on her children, and proudly held herself as Mrs. Joe Abbott. The day Joe died, a little boy from down the block rang the doorbell and waited on the porch. When the door opened, he held out a bag of candy for Mike, hoping it would make him feel better.

  They’d never buried Jim. He’d joined the Navy, been stationed on a battleship in the Mediterranean Sea, and disappeared in 1957 while on furlough in Greece. The Navy told Joe and Frances Abbott their son had drowned off the island of Rhodes. Jim’s body, however, was not found, nor were his clothing or belongings. At Frances’s urging, Joe hired a private investigator, who reported that Jim had met a girl while on leave in Rhodes. Accompanied by the woman at the end of his leave, Jim was late to the dock, missing the boat that would ferry him to his ship. Local police said a woman had come to them, frantic about an American sailor she’d left down by the water. She told them he was agitated and threatening to swim for his ship. When the woman returned to the dock with the policemen, the sailor—Jim Abbott—was gone. After a short search, the police—and eventually the Navy—presumed him drowned.

  Frances didn’t believe it. For years she would tell Mike, “Your brother is going to walk in the door someday.” For a while, Mike believed her, too.

  First Jim and then Joe, and the house was impenetrably sad. Three of the older children were married and no longer living at home. The rest—Tom, Betty, and Mike, the baby—were sent away: Tom to a military school in Wisconsin, Mike to a military school in Kalamazoo, and Betty to a boarding school run by nuns.

  The name, Jim, like the memory of him, stayed with Mike. Indeed, had his brother walked in the door one day, like his mom promised, maybe none of it would have happened. Maybe his dad doesn’t die from heartache and his mom doesn’t wither away, and the family stays together in one house and none of it gets so hard. At Barbour Hall Junior Military Academy, Mike figured he spent almost as much time in the brig as he did the classroom and, when Frances consented to bring him home after a year, it seemed to Mike that the officers there were as happy to be done with him as he was with them.

  KATHY’S MOTHER, ALSO named Frances, sat in the backseat of the Impala with Kathy, stroking her hair. Frances Adams knew the drill; she’d had six children herself. Mike caught glimpses of them in the rearview mirror, reflexively looking up when a new contraction seized Kathy, then back down the highway that didn’t seem to ever end. He met Kathy’s eyes and wondered where the damn exit was.

  His own mother was back in Flint, waiting for word of the birth. By then she’d been widowed more than a decade and wore just about every day of it. She’d done what she could with Mike, who came back from military school and hit the streets of Flint with a chip on his shoulder. The life he’d had—the full, warm house, the sturdy father and mother, the comfort that tomorrow would be just like today—was gone. In its place was anger, and an unwillingness to stand with the others and take orders with the others and conform like the others.

  Katie, one of Mike’s older sisters, called him “a heller on wheels,” and it fit, because Mike had an engine that wouldn’t stop and a taste for recklessness. He wasn’t a bad kid, just an unbridled one, and it wasn’t long before the family adopted the maxim “Only Mike,” a phrase often accompanied by agreement that it was a good thing everyone had escaped unharmed once again.

  Meanwhile, as Mike found his way in it, the neighborhood was changing. After perhaps its most prosperous decade ever, Flint pushed through the 1960s dogged by signs of an economic downturn, white flight, and plain neglect. The city was beginning to fray, both in its structures and its relationships. While the community seemed to be lingering more and more on its differences—primarily along economic and racial lines—one of its strong commonalities was sports. Flint might have been known for its auto industry, but it was in its heart a sports town. The merging races and incomes and personalities generally put aside their territorial suspicions for a good game. And Mike was in, whatever the game, even as a young teen. He cared little for Flint’s economic direction,
as long as the rims stayed mostly unbent on the Flint Central schoolyard, just a few blocks from Mike’s back door. He and his buddies played basketball in gyms all over town. Flint was the birthplace of community education, a plan to make the city’s schools centers for neighborhood activity and growth and vitality. One of the by-products of community education was unlocked gymnasium doors into the night and a well-lit place to play five-on-five. On their driveway, the cement chipped and cracked and untrue, Mike’s brother Tom taught him to go to his left and to box out and to take an elbow without running inside to Ma. They’d bolted a backboard and rim to the garage, and they’d play Around the World until the sweat chilled their backs and it was time to go inside. These were the skills and attitude Mike took into the schools, usually against boys and men much older. Skin color and economic condition were meaningless. You could ball or you couldn’t. You could hold the court or you couldn’t. On other afternoons, Mike and his buddies would lay claim to a backyard and play tackle football until dinnertime and the shrill voices of mothers up and down the block thinned the teams to almost nothing. Often, the games played under the moon on one side of the field and a porch light on the other required more courage and toughness than anything going on at Memorial Park or Central High. Boys endeavored to become men out there—bloodied and scarred, pissed-off and having the times of their lives.

  Mike stood in there every day, every night. Still, it would take an exceptional person to help Mike focus himself. The battle was most often within Mike. His older brothers were checking in on him from time to time, ensuring he didn’t stray too far. Outside the house, though, he was on his own. He was soon old enough and talented enough to play for Jack Pratt, part coach, part philosopher, and, in this part of Michigan, part deity. He coached every season of the school year. If you were an athlete, you belonged to Coach Pratt, body, mind, and conscience. By eighth grade, Mike was practicing with the varsity football team, playing halfback and defensive back for Pratt’s scout teams. By ninth grade, he was starting both ways. Mike, like the other boys, heard the sermons, sometimes in a group with his teammates, sometimes with Coach Pratt’s eyes boring into his own.