Imperfect: An Improbable Life

by Jim Abbott

  Taken in itself, beginning with that horrible start in Cleveland, living with it for going on a week, hating it, preparing and then sticking with a completely different plan, then living it for almost three hours, for all that, the final moment arrived with shocking suddenness.

  I’d survived all the little bounces that could have changed it. We’d survived it, Nokes and I, the nine of us in all. It had come true. What remained was this very cool celebration, hugs from Nokes and Cloninger and Williams, from everyone, in a place like Yankee Stadium. It took a long time to leave the field, in part because I didn’t want to. I didn’t want anyone picking up the trash just yet, or hosing this moment away.

  Amid all those bodies, feet stomping around, various gloves and gear strewn on the infield, I found my cap on the ground near the first-base line, randomly. I wasn’t really even looking for it. I tipped it to the crowd.

  “One of the most wonderful moments,” Kubek was saying in the booth, “for as sweet a man as there is in any uniform in a major sport.”

  More important for this afternoon, I’d managed a great result from the pitcher’s mound. We’d won. I’d held together and, by the ninth, was throwing the ball with conviction. I descended into the dugout, thrilled so many people were still in the park. Over the dugout, Yankee fans hugged and shouted and laughed, and I felt just like they did. Someone had scooped up my jacket. The cups were still there, stacked just so. Passing along the bench, I made a left into the tunnel that led to the clubhouse, and the cheers chased me up that narrow, dark, and musty passageway.

  There would be champagne. And there would be another trip to the field, where I’d raise my arms to the people behind the dugout, and then I’d summon Nokes, who needed to share in that. He’d been so good. He’d believed.

  There were writers everywhere in the clubhouse, asking questions between the phone calls, the hugs, the laughs.

  In Anaheim, Tim Mead grinned. “Every time Jimmy succeeded after he left,” he’d say, “I wanted to say out loud, ‘Look what Jimmy Abbott did today.’ I can remember all you naysayers, whoever you are, well, screw you. For all the individual accomplishments I was privileged to be around, and I wasn’t around for that, I may have felt as happy for Jim Abbott doing that as for any athlete. He did it.”

  In Florida, Doug Rader was charmed.

  “I’ve seen a ton of no-hitters,” Rader, who then was a coach with the expansion Marlins, would say, “and I’ll never forget Abby’s. Most no-hitters are almost clinical. They’re just so aggressive. Jim’s, I don’t know, it touched me emotionally.”

  In California, Marcel Lachemann nodded and smiled. Cloninger had come to him in spring training, wondering where my big fastball was, wondering about the velocity. Tony told him he wasn’t sure I could pitch anymore.

  “Next thing you knew,” Lach would say, “he was throwing a no-hitter at Yankee Stadium.”

  In Michigan, Mike and Kathy Abbott celebrated with Chad, who’d come up from the driveway and burst through the door with the news. And in homes from Anaheim to Baltimore, in places where children wished only to be normal, to fit in, maybe the world took another step toward them, not away.

  Amid the cheering and the toasts (George Steinbrenner sent the bottle), the best moment of the day came in the hallway outside the clubhouse. Normally she would wait in the family room, but Dana had been led to the big metal door. I came out in my uniform, unbuttoned to the middle of my chest. Her expression was of pride, disbelief, and joy, ultimately a reflection of all that had gone on in our lives for the past couple years.

  In that dingy cement corridor, where New York sent its reinforcements to feed on the news of the day, we stood for just a few seconds alone in the swarm of lights and gazes.

  “How about that?” I said, smiling.

  “How about that,” she whispered, smiling back.

  We’d come all this way, from California to New York, from familiar to foreign, and seemed to hit every bump along the way. Now we laughed and held each other in the clamor of the hallway, and for a moment all the cameras disappeared, and it felt a lot like we’d made something of it all. I left her with a promise that I wouldn’t be long.

  Back in the clubhouse, twenty-five men raised plastic cups to the occasion, to the 234th no-hitter in major-league history, the eighth by a Yankee, and the sixth by a Yankee in this ballpark.

  The cab ride home, back along the Major Deegan, over the Third Avenue Bridge, then to the FDR Drive and onto the surface streets of the Upper East Side, seemed less rutted and jarring than they’d been eight hours before.

  In the backseat, Dana and I relived the final outs: the Lofton bunt that skewed foul, the Fermin drive that on another day and in another ballpark might have changed everything, and the clamor that chased Baerga’s ball straight into Velarde’s glove.

  In the apartment, the red bulb on the answering machine blinked impatiently. And the phone was ringing.

  “Big Jim,” Chad shouted from Michigan, “with the no-no!”

  We dialed the phone and shared the good news, and in between picked up the phone and apologized for the busy signals. Our view was of the East River and a sliver of the skyline downtown. Sitting twenty-seven stories high and looking out over a small slice of the city, opening another bottle of champagne, we marveled at the way the world turns over anew again every day, and then was kind enough to include us. In the clinks of our tulip glasses, we shared a wish that this was the start of something very good. Neither of us dared dampen the night with the words.

  We took the two-person party downstairs and into the streets of the Upper East Side, and to Cronies, a bar that felt a little like home. Mattingly sent a bottle from across the bar, as did strangers in Yankee caps, and we celebrated as dusk turned to night. This was the New York we’d longed for, as I’m just as sure this was the Jim Abbott for which New York had yearned.

  In most other cities, the people identify with the local team. They cheer and they boo and then they go home to their lives. In New York, allegiances are tauter than that. The Yankees and their fans are bound by history, by the men who wore the uniform and the fathers and grandfathers who witnessed their greatness and failures. The relationship bordered on obsession for each other, so that on special days in that ballpark, tens of thousands of people in the stands and the players on the field seemed to share a single heartbeat.

  I’d had a day like that.

  Not just a game, but an entire day. When we left Cronies, the streets were alive on a Saturday night. Corner vendors already were selling copies of the next morning’s papers, and people called to me and waved the early editions of the Post and the Daily News, their back pages trumpeting history at The Stadium. I signed autographs as we walked, feeling for the first time that I belonged among these people—Yankee fans, New Yorkers, those who worshipped the pinstripes.

  Dana and I slept that night feeling as close to New York City as we ever had, and probably ever would. It wasn’t home, exactly, but a place familiar and comforting, like we were starting to fit in, like we’d justified our presence there. It was good to belong.

  The alarm shrieked mid-morning. There was a game in four hours, and a flight to Texas after that. Through the mild thumping in my head, I filled a suitcase with ten days of wardrobe and supplies. No matter the game, the routine always won.

  Downstairs, the doorman grinned his congratulations and nodded toward the sidewalk, where a television crew stared back through the glass. The headache kicked up a notch, maybe two. A yellow cab took me past the usual landmarks, into the Bronx, along the perimeter of the stadium and to the back gate, where more cameras waited. It hadn’t occurred to me the story might creep into another day, after the box seats had been wiped down, after the mound had been re-groomed. My footsteps echoed in the corridor where the afternoon before I’d had to turn sideways to navigate the mass of people. On the other side of the metal door, my locker was surrounded by reporters, some of whom had come from Philadelphia and Boston and Ba
ltimore to sort through the day after. The Advil was all the way across the clubhouse.

  I went along with the storylines because, I guess, the moment had earned them. The story for the story’s sake, the one-handed pitcher making his way, I never liked. The story with achievement, however, seemed more relevant. That had been the goal—to be a good pitcher. To win games. I’d needed to earn my way, to be good enough, to hold on to the hope that more was possible. I’d wanted to lift my arms to a gray sky, to honor a victory, to feel the approval in my heart. The stories could say what they wanted, but two-handed guys or one-handed guys don’t throw no-hitters. Pitchers throw them. Eight other men share them. And maybe occasionally one of those nine doesn’t look exactly like the others, but the game doesn’t recognize that.

  Boggs kept looking at me, smiling genuinely, like he hadn’t put yesterday away yet, either. He was a touch offbeat, Boggs was, but he loved the game, its history, and the way it evolved a little every day. I thought he was enjoying the memory as much as I was.

  I was summoned to the trainer’s room to take a call from St. Louis. On the line was Dave Righetti, whose San Francisco Giants were finishing a series against the Cardinals. A decade before, he’d no-hit the Boston Red Sox as a Yankee and in this ballpark, the first Yankee to throw a no-hitter since Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series, and the last until the afternoon before.

  Frank Albohn, the groundskeeper, asked if I had a moment, and in a side room he and his crew presented me with the pitching rubber. They’d spent the night before exhuming it from the mound, then had it signed by my teammates and the plate umpire, Ted Hendry. The groundskeepers signed the rubber as well. I was struck by their generosity, and then by the amount of work it must have taken.

  Albohn was built low and wiry, like a middle infielder or a center fielder. The old-timers around the team, the ones from the neighborhood who raked the infield or mowed the grass or knocked mud from our spikes, would say that Frank indeed had been a ballplayer. He’d been fast and sure-handed, enough so that the New York Giants had had him in for a tryout. When they didn’t have him back, Albohn went to work at a machine shop near Yankee Stadium. There, he’d had an accident. Years later, when he was grooming the area around home plate or meticulously laying the foul lines before a game or hustling across the field when the rains came, you’d have to look closely to see that one of those machine blades from the shop had fired unexpectedly, taking off most of Albohn’s left hand.

  Gradually, the clubhouse cleared, and soon there was another game. I sat on the bench with hardly a care, staring out to the field, still amazed at what had happened there just yesterday. Baseball rarely stops to consider the game before, but on that Sunday morning there was a pause, at least for me, before starting up again. We won and moved into first place, tied with the Blue Jays, for the last time that season.

  Six days later, in Kansas City, I pitched again. The first batter of the bottom of the first inning, Greg Gagne, got just enough of a cutter to push it over Mattingly’s head and down the right-field line. It was a decent pitch. I watched the ball roll untouched and Gagne run hard into second base, and I turned to Nokes and thought again about the game, how it honors itself in its relentlessness.

  Behind the mound, I waited, my glove on my left hand. I wanted the ball. I wanted to pitch.

  CHAPTER 19

  My parents believed my missing hand was a responsibility to be lived up to.

  I didn’t always get it.

  How do you honor something that doesn’t exist? I searched the length of my right arm and saw emptiness.

  They saw potential.

  I suspected limitation.

  They saw an opportunity for resiliency, of body and spirit. They saw hope for me, and then for others.

  There is a white box in Tim Mead’s office at Angel Stadium that once had been emptied of ten reams of copier paper. Over two decades, Mead carted it around, lugged it into new offices, cleared space for it in new closets, slid it across new carpeting and old linoleum, and nudged it into corners with his foot.

  The box had grown out of a single red folder in Mead’s right-hand desk drawer—a tab, center-right, labeled it ABBOTT, JIM—to what it is today, a dozen 8 ½-by-14 red folders, some yawning with crispy newspaper clippings, lustrous magazine pages, and forgotten game programs.

  In those files, however, there are mostly children, boys and girls who innocently reached out and touched my hand, and who smiled, and who—I hope—dreamed. Their every new level, like mine, would be a gift.

  They begin,

  “Dear Mr. Abbott, I have a son who is five …”

  “Dear Mr. Abbott, I’m writing this letter for the son of a very dear friend …”

  “Dear Mr. Abbott, I have a daughter …”

  “Dear Mr. Abbott, I know you’re busy with baseball …”

  And there are stories, heartbreaking stories of cerebral palsy, and accidents, and birth defects, and amputations, and a little girl who opened a toothpaste tube that had been rigged with an explosive and lost her hand.

  And there are words difficult to find, because the pain is real and the fight doesn’t get easier when the bandages come off and the consequences are lifelong. I couldn’t make it go away in four paragraphs. I hadn’t made it go away for thirty years.

  I write,

  “Dear Brendon … don’t hesitate to challenge yourself.”

  “Dear David … physical handicaps have little or no control over our mental abilities.”

  “Dear Josh … your story is so special.…”

  “Dear Jason … you and I both know that handicaps are only setbacks in the eyes of others.”

  They came to the ballparks, mostly. They stood with their parents, or just behind them. I remember their faces. I remember their hurt and their hope. I remember thinking there were so many of them, these beautiful children who’d grown scared and timid and already were tired of having to be so strong. Sometimes, I was tired, too.

  Over forty years, a good part of them spent in and around the game, all of them alongside a disability I hoped was not defining me, the children were the inspirations. Those mid-afternoon taps on the shoulder from Tim, me leaving behind the comfort of the clubhouse to sit in the dugout with the young Brendons and Davids and Joshes and Jasons, the children gave me hope. They were in Anaheim and Baltimore and New York, in Chicago and Kansas City. They were poor and rich and middle-class and they were every color.

  They came with stories and a little sadness, but with a preternatural capacity to endure and to fight.

  A long time ago, I sat with many of them and walked with others. Some, I played catch with, and they’d maneuver their glove just the way they’d practiced in their bedrooms, in their mirrors and away from all the other kids, like I had.

  Most important, we talked. I rewarmed the encouragement my parents had offered once upon a time and I repeated their stories. Mom and Dad had searched for people who rose above hardships in their lives to make extraordinary contributions. Years later I told the children about those people. And I shared with their parents the example of my parents, their “why not” attitude, the way they made me feel up to every challenge, as though I was not just capable in spite of being different but special for being different. Their message to me was powerful when I was young, and it became powerful in me. They believed there were many ways to navigate our worlds, and that because my way was different didn’t mean it wasn’t as efficient.

  There I was, trying to be the kind of person my parents might have been on the lookout for, and because of that I would nod at Tim and excuse myself from the card table or remove my headphones and close my book. Honestly, there were times—many times—I’d have preferred to hunker down in the clubhouse. But I trailed Tim to the dugout, I guess because I couldn’t disappoint them, and because I needed to tell them they didn’t have to fall in with what people thought they could do or would become.

  Indeed, what drove me were the low expec
tations people had for me, especially in new situations. I insisted on showing them what I could do. I could play Little League. I could play for the high school. I could go to college and win an Olympic medal and pitch in the big leagues. I might not win, but I could fight. As I continued to wage my own battles, I tried to offer more promise to the children in theirs as well, encouraging them to rise above what other people thought was possible for them. Once I saw the look in their eyes, and their parents’ eyes, it would be very hard to say no anyway. How could I not make the time?

  Ultimately, I think my playing was of more consequence than my words. I hated being labeled—one-armed, one-handed, disabled, whatever—and I understood how we all wanted to move beyond those kinds of perceptions, but I felt the sting of those throwaway words every day. It would take success on a major-league field to clear the path, to make even one of those kids believe. It wouldn’t be enough to get by, to show up. I needed to accomplish something more tangible than participation. We all did, I thought. If I didn’t last, didn’t perform and produce, even my baseball would have seemed based on me being different. That’s what set my jaw so tight when a couple runs scored and what cut me loose in the weight room when I lost. It’s what helped bring me back when my fastball was surely gone. I adored the game first, but I owed everybody around it second.

  Some of my closest friends and people I admired most in the game believed my pitching suffered because of the time I spent trying to further a cause—often one child at a time—that was so personal to me. Those in that camp—and my friends weren’t the only ones—believed I carried a torch that became burdensome, both in body and mind.

  After I was 11-14 with a 4.37 ERA and the Yankees missed the playoffs in my first season in New York, George Steinbrenner announced the following spring that Jim Abbott would be better off giving “100 percent of his attention to baseball.”