Imperfect: An Improbable Life

by Jim Abbott

  “You’re not going to make this team,” Bavasi said. “Here is your choice: Go back to the minors and work your way back or take your release.”

  I’d gotten to the ballpark early that day, said my hellos, and changed into my uniform. Then I sat across from Bavasi wishing it were different, wishing I had a fastball to defend myself with, and wishing I wasn’t wearing the uniform. It seemed out of place, like a Halloween costume in March.

  The choice was Triple-A or unemployment, neither of which sounded like an attractive career move. He’d stated the obvious, that it just wasn’t getting any better, maybe it was best to move on, or stick around and serve the organization as a coach or consultant or something. I kept thinking I was too young for that. For any of this. Two years remained on my contract and I desperately wanted to make good on it.

  Telling him I’d think it over, I left his office and returned to the clubhouse, where I laced on my spikes, put on my cap, and picked up my glove. Maybe somebody would give me the ball.

  Tim Mead, a wonderful friend who’d been through so much with me, put his hand on my shoulder and asked if I wanted to take a walk. We found ourselves in center field and sat down, our backs to the outfield wall. I talked about all that had led me there, the pressure, my stinkin’ fastball that needed miles per hour and direction. Tim had seen me at my worst—the nights I’d lose and punish myself emotionally in front of my locker, or physically in the weight room—and at my best. Here we were at another crossroad, only this time my career was in jeopardy. We talked about family, about financial security, about moving on without the game, finding a purpose beyond baseball.

  I think he knew I wasn’t going back to the minors and starting over, especially with Maddy at home. After a while, we stood and headed back across the field. The rest of the team was coming out to stretch, and I walked through the group, literally going in separate directions. I paused to say good-bye to Chuck Finley and Mark Langston. My world was ending, I thought, and theirs was going on. As they reached for something meaningful to say, I fought back tears and gave them a little wave, then left to find Bavasi. I was a wreck. The conversation came and went, jagged because it was unpracticed.

  “I’ll take my release,” I told him.

  “Are you sure?” he asked. “Maybe you can figure it out.”

  “It seems like these things, I don’t know, aren’t going to go away,” I said.

  Billy stared. I reached for more.

  “They’re a distraction to you and a burden on me,” I said.

  He wasn’t disagreeing. I’d hoped he might.

  “It would only continue the drama,” I said, and after a breath, added, “I’m through.”

  He nodded again. Neither of us knew who was supposed to talk next. I was stunned by the finality of it, and maybe Billy was, too. I wanted to leave, but didn’t know how. He wanted me to leave, too. So I nodded back. And as I turned to find the door, he said something about the two years remaining on my contract, that the team would “seek relief” or something, but I wasn’t listening anymore.

  I left my uniform in the laundry bin, packed nothing important into a cardboard box, and hugged a few former teammates. I was so jealous of them, being able to play still. In my truck, I drove to a lower field looking for Lach. This, I thought, is what it feels like when a career ends: standing in the outfield of a minor-league field holding nothing but disappointment. If Lach said anything, I didn’t hear it. He had been there through so much, had shown so much faith in me, and had endured the disappointments with such great compassion. The only kind of good-bye to a man such as Lach was the terrible and wrenching kind.

  Then I drove home to California, listening to Willie Nelson and barely comprehending that the game, the Angels, all of it would go on without me. There’d always been an answer to the struggles before. More effort. More focus. Throw harder. Throw softer. Throw more curveballs, or fewer. But now this was it. All I could do was drive faster, to get home and to get away. My family, I decided, needed me.

  As I rode westbound on I-10, Willie’s song “Your Memory Won’t Die in My Grave” seeped into my head. “Baby’s taking a trip,” he said, “but she ain’t taking me.”

  By the time I cleared the state line late Sunday morning, clubhouse attendants had cleaned out my locker and removed the nameplate from above it, like I’d never been there.

  In the afternoon, reporters found Langston shaken by the morning’s news.

  “This,” he told them, “is a very difficult, a very emotional time. Jim is like a brother to me, and I guarantee you no one in this clubhouse worked harder than he did this winter. That’s why this is so disappointing. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I know this is not what he wanted.”

  “I want what’s best for Jim,” Lach said. “I love him like a son. I told him I can answer any questions he has, but I can’t make the decision for him. It has to come from him.”

  Of course, I’d already made my decision. I was going home, and already halfway there. The game goes on, I thought. I wasn’t part of it. I thought there would be relief. There wasn’t.

  Dana was at the door and I had nothing to say. She looked at me kindly, glad to have me, and all I could think about was all the people I’d let down, starting with her. At least Maddy would have a full-time dad.

  Dana viewed the homecoming as an end to the suffering. While she held me and assured me we’d find something to do with the rest of our lives, she was thinking it had been too hard for too long, that perhaps one good hug for both of us would leave baseball behind. The game—at least my struggles in it—had hung around our necks for long enough.

  I needed to talk to Harvey. The answering machine in my office held twenty-three messages. Most were from friends, teammates, and family. One was from Boras. Another was from the Angels’ financial officer. I’d kept a spiral-bound notebook on a bookshelf, in among signed baseballs from Mickey Mantle (“To Jim, My best wishes. Stay hot. Mickey Mantle”), my boyhood idol Mark Fidrych, Ronald Reagan, and Bruce Springsteen. On the first clean page I wrote the names of those who called. I turned that page and dialed Harvey’s number. I found a pencil and transcribed as quickly as I could, writing the words just large enough so I could go back and read them, and just small enough that they wouldn’t sting, Still, he filled a couple pages.

  “Using your family as a way out,” he said, was a “cop out.”

  “See, Jim,” he said, “we invent motives for our behavior. You use the separation from family in one context and not the other? Does that make sense? If you were pitching well, you’d still live for your family.”

  I underlined “family.”

  “To what extent will you regret this?” he searched. “What about in five years? Can you live with it appropriately? Use all the info, then you’ll have no regret. Until then, it may be what you feel, but true is better.”

  I lingered on “true.” The truth was, my fastball was gone, and it would still be gone in the minor leagues. The truth was, it was humiliating. The truth was the Angels didn’t want me anymore.

  “It’s a bitch,” he said, “to get released by beating yourself. Have you given the best to the Angels? Do you owe them Triple-A?”

  I honestly didn’t know.

  Harvey kept going. I kept scribbling.

  “The issue rests with you. Can you live with it? If you have to bury this, then it’s wrong. If you’re tired, then there you go. Do you have the energy or inclination to continue? If you enjoy it, then continue fighting, because an environment like this will never challenge you again.”

  Was I done with baseball? Does baseball decide? Or do I decide?

  “The ordeal”—Harvey’s word for “life”—“will be a quiet, solitary one.”

  I said good-bye, put down the phone, closed the notebook.

  Dana was relieved. When I couldn’t wander the house wishing I was at the ballpark any longer, we took Maddy to Hawaii. And when we returned, I did what any out-of-work twenty-nine-
year-old would do. I gathered the family and took off for a cabin in Good Hart, Michigan, my favorite place in the world, bought a twenty-one-foot Boston Whaler, and tooled around Lake Michigan all summer.

  Even then, weeks after my final spring training game, a bruise lingered on my shin, a yellow-green-purple reminder of the comebacker I couldn’t glove against the Rockies. Into summer, it still hurt to the touch, the last evidence that I was once a player. It seemed strange to be out of the game so quickly that a superficial injury would follow me into retirement, if that’s what this was to be. When the sun set over the lake I’d turn on the television and watch my teammates play baseball, still sore from when they really were my teammates.

  I so missed it I ached.

  The feeling wasn’t mutual, apparently. A stray letter from former Dodgers, Angels, and Padres executive—and Bill’s father—Buzzie Bavasi, who encouraged me to return to the game wherever I could, was the only correspondence I received with that message. I’d pitched myself out of the game. No team was going to invite me back in.

  Had the year been 2007—2002, even—and I’d pitched until I had nothing left but fifteen years of big-league memories, a winning record, and an empty jar of Advil, the wind against my face would have smelled of contentment.

  I knew my career would end in Good Hart, retirement guided by Little Traverse Light, a speck of glowing green in the gloaming. It is a town of fewer than five hundred people near the top of the Michigan mitt, twenty-five miles or so from the Straits of Mackinac and the Mackinac Bridge, which spans the meeting place of the Great Lakes Michigan and Huron. Of the seven or eight businesses in downtown Good Hart, five—the general store, bakery, deli, and real estate and post offices—are in a single one-story building. Fords vacationed not far away, as did Wrigleys. I had a place big enough for a bedroom, a loft, and a few regrets.

  But I’d have my family nearby, splashing in the shore water in the mornings and building campfires at night. In between, we’d sand and paint the old cottage, built only twenty-five years before but worn by the hard winters of the North Woods.

  And while Dana, Maddy, and I filled our days just so, I was not satisfied. Maybe it was the contract or my age or the feeling I’d left something undone, but I spent the summer with one eye on the baseball on television and the other on the calendar. I’d decided I didn’t deserve to be there, in my idea of paradise, watching a baseball season disappear with the whitecaps over the horizon.

  The contract gnawed at my sense of fairness. I’d signed for three seasons and pitched one of them, and the one was a disaster. Now that I was sitting on a patio twenty feet above the shoreline in Northern Michigan watching my little girl wobble around, I worried I was taking money I didn’t deserve, or that other people thought I was taking money I didn’t deserve, which is sort of what I thought. I talked to Dana, Boras, and my accountant, all of whom said they understood yet looked at me like I was overly sentimental and foolish. The standard argument—had I won twenty games, the Angels would not have insisted I take a raise—came up often. The logic rang hollow.

  It wasn’t something I was proud of, and I wish I’d been that person who could have stood up and said, “No, this isn’t right, you keep the money.”

  But I wasn’t. Maddy’s future was in those paychecks. So was all the work I’d done to earn the contract.

  Maybe, had Gene Autry still owned the club, I would have felt different. But Disney did. The club sent a lawyer to meet with Boras, a conversation that went no further than Boras’s refusal to negotiate a buyout.

  So, from May until September, from early in the season when the harbor was nearly devoid of boats until the harbor nearly emptied again at the end of the season, I—we—avoided tomorrow the best we could. I’d never really captained a boat before, never mind something as unwieldy as a twenty-one-footer, and my trips to Harbor Point and back usually ended with some mooring drama. It wasn’t long before the other boat owners in the marina would see me coming and dash along the dock, grabbing ropes, offering rubber fenders, shouting instructions, whatever they could to save their own boats. At that point, I might have been a better pitcher than a boat driver.

  The solitude was good for all of us. The cottage was in the woods, away from the road, reachable only by a small electric trolley on a track that plunged 180 feet to the front door. The place was as rustic as it got, made of fieldstone and board-and-batten siding; inside a fieldstone fireplace, one bedroom, and a loft. From the back patio I could kick a rock into the water. Mom and Dad came around that summer and we’d sit out back and not talk about baseball. The summer before, when I couldn’t win, I’d driven from Cleveland to spend a day with Dad and he’d had his say then.

  “If this is it for you,” he’d said, “I’m proud of you and what you’ve done.”

  He knew I was hurting.

  He added, “Remember where you’re from.”

  The distance I’d come, he meant. That I’d done more than most, maybe a little more than some might have expected. It wasn’t enough for me, of course. Not near enough. But I understood what he was saying. And a year later, sitting lakeside near the end of an idle summer—the first of my life—he didn’t give me that Dad look and order me back onto the playground. Instead, we shared a couple beers, laughed with Maddy, watched the sun go down, and ignored the fact I’d washed out at twenty-nine.

  Before we knew it, the afternoons weren’t warming with the sun anymore and the fireplace was lit round the clock and it was time to come out of seclusion. Dana and I packed up, locked down the cottage for winter, and boarded a flight to L.A.

  I never did name the boat.

  The phone rang in early spring, or about the time I assumed my next game of catch would be with Maddy. Buck Rodgers, who’d managed the Angels for parts of five seasons and was a notable bus-crash casualty in that time, wanted to know about the family, and how I was feeling, and after a while he was talking me into a comeback. Rodgers had been fired by the Angels almost four years before, but stayed close to the game, had some ties to independent teams, and knew his baseball.

  At least I hoped so. A few times a week I’d leave the house—Dana would watch out of the corner of her eye, wary as to where this was headed—meet Rodgers at a local junior college, and throw. He said if I could learn a split-fingered fastball, I could throw that off my fastball and have the off-speed pitch I’d been searching for.

  It was a reach. But, it was good to stand on a mound again, and good to have someone believe in me. Though I’d opted for my release over the minor leagues the spring before, turned out I’d never been ready to quit. Actually, it felt more like the game had quit on me, and not unjustifiably. I could be hopeful again, I was sure. Maybe the year off, a new team, a reset away from the Angels, maybe I could try. So it hadn’t taken Rodgers long to convince me that one more shot wouldn’t do any harm, and six weeks later I was on another mound, this one in Chicago, at Comiskey Park, in a tryout. I didn’t have a splitter, but, after twelve months off, my arm—I must say—felt pretty good. Robin Ventura and Frank Thomas, Olympic teammates from a decade before, watched nearby. Magglio Ordonez, a rookie in ’98, stood in and took some swings. Ron Schueler, the general manager of the White Sox, had one eye on me and another on a radar gun.

  When I was done, Schueler told me he’d give me a chance. I nodded, ecstatic. I was getting my career back. Maybe.

  I’d start in Class A, in Hickory, North Carolina, he said. We’d go from there. He promised not to lose track of me.

  I’d be a Crawdad. At thirty. With a bunch of nineteen-year-olds as teammates, like I was the dad at a T-ball game.

  I couldn’t wait.

  Dana wasn’t so sure. She’d long before thought baseball was supposed to be more fun, rather than engender such regular heartache. While sympathetic to my four-day mood cycles after losses, as well as to my inability to walk away from the game before it was taken away, she’d grown weary of the defeats, of sharing our relationship with them. Yet, sh
e went along with the minor-league experiment, half expecting me to walk back through the door in two weeks.

  I never did, at least not that season, though I did call home plenty, wondering what I was doing out there on the blue highways, hanging out with teammates who couldn’t buy a beer without a fake I.D., and searching for velocity in a dozen new places. And I couldn’t shake the guilt of being off on my own, chasing what was now a vague and seemingly impossible dream, while Dana alone raised our little girl.

  From the perspective of a rickety folding chair, surrounded by fast-food wrappers and pizza boxes, wondering what sort of flesh-eating something was living on the floor of the nearby shower, watching a major-league game on television in a minor-league clubhouse is about as far away from that dream as I could have been.

  The uniform, however, was real. The games meant something to me, as did the path on which they sent me. Before long, I graduated from the A-ball Hickory Crawdads to the high-A Winston-Salem Warthogs, made four starts there, and became a Double-A Birmingham Baron.

  This was my summer of 150 teammates, of thousands of hard miles, of catchers whose names I couldn’t remember, of lunch eaten off my lap on a bench seat bound for somewhere else. On the days I didn’t pitch, I’d sit in the bleachers and chart someone else’s pitches. And I’d sweat. One night in Chattanooga a scout looked at me, leaned over, and said, “What the hellya doin’? Need more money?”

  I laughed and thought, Damned good question, pal.

  He wouldn’t have understood—or maybe he would have—but I just wanted to play again. I wanted to finish better, if being finished was what I was. And I wanted to see if the weight of everything in Anaheim had become too much to bear, if maybe the ability that had leaked out of me might be sopped up and recycled.

  A few nights later, with Dana and Maddy in the stands in Birmingham, I was bombed and gone after two innings. When they boarded a plane for Michigan the next morning, Dana struggling to corral Maddy and their luggage and the stroller and get them all on the plane together, I fought the urge to get on the plane with them. I nearly quit the next day, but Roger McDowell, the pitching coach, wouldn’t allow it.