by Ron Darling
I was stunned, mortified. I couldn’t think how to respond, except to look around and see if anyone else was looking, if I was maybe on the receiving end of some joke—you know, one of those rookie hazing moments I’d been told to expect. But this was no joke. There was no one paying attention—even Hodges had moved on to go about his business, now that he could scratch spit on the new guy from his to-do list.
The asshole didn’t say a word, didn’t crack a smile, didn’t give away any tic or look or gesture to suggest that he was simply razzing me and that such as this was all in good fun. No, he just shot this wad of tobacco juice and turned away—a spit-and-run that left me feeling like a humiliated piece of shit.
So I just sat there, embarrassed as hell, terrified to move from my shame for fear of making things worse. I’d only been issued the one uniform, so it’s not like I could have retreated to the clubhouse for a new pair of pants, and I worried that if I moved to rub or blot out the stain I’d be marked as a different kind of coward. So I just sat there, like an idiot, awash in the ignominy of the moment, and for the duration of that first game I tried to casually cover the stain by resting my elbow or forearm on my thigh, by crossing my leg over the “wound” or draping my jacket across my lap, the whole time thinking, What the fuck am I into here?
* * *
I opened the 1992 season with back-to-back starts against the Kansas City Royals. The first game, at Oakland, went pretty well. I took a shutout into the ninth with a 5–0 lead, and Dennis Eckersley was able to seal the deal for us after I gave up a walk to George Brett and a two-run homer to Jim Eisenreich to start the inning.
So far, so good.
The second game, at Kansas City, did not go so well. Oh, I got off to another strong start, even had a no-hitter going into the eighth, but then the wheels kind of fell off, which takes me to my favorite Rick Honeycutt story. It’s also one of my best “game that got away” stories, although “best” is probably not the right adjective, so perhaps I should call it the most illustrative.
Now, in fairness to Rick, who went on to become one of the most respected pitching coaches in the game, he was a much better pitcher (and fielder!) than this hard-luck story suggests—hey, you don’t rack up a twenty-one-year career as a big league pitcher unless you know how to get people out, right? However, the hard luck in this case was mostly mine. I allowed a lead-off single in the eighth to Keith Miller, my old Mets teammate, and with the no-hitter off the table Tony La Russa decided I was done. I’d thrown over a hundred pitches, we were at the front end of a long season, and he wanted to push whatever buttons managers push when they’re trying to preserve a one-run lead. Also, I suspect he thought a left-hander would do a better job keeping a speedster like Miller close at first base, even though holding runners had long been one of my strengths as a pitcher.
I always hated to leave a tight game, especially after I’d pitched well and was still throwing hard, but I can understand La Russa’s thinking—at least, all these years later, I can understand it. At the time, I was probably pissed, but he handed the ball to Rick Honeycutt to finish the inning, most likely thinking that if everything went according to plan he would then hand the ball over to Eck in the ninth to close things out. Only that’s not exactly how things worked out. The next batter was Chris Gwynn, Tony’s brother, who squared to bunt. That was the correct baseball move in this spot, to push the runner into scoring position. The other correct move was to throw over to first, to see if you could get the batter to tip his hand. Trouble was, Rick fielded the ball and made an errant throw, putting runners on first and second with nobody out. Terry Shumpert followed in a similar spot, and he too squared to bunt—resulting in a botched fielder’s choice that left all three runners on base, with nobody out.
This was where things got interesting—or, I should say, maddening. Honeycutt threw a wild pitch to Brian McCrae, and Miller dashed down the line to score, with Gwynn crossing over to third. My 1–0 lead was shot. Then he threw another wild pitch, and Gwynn sprinted home, costing us the game.
Just like that, in a span of a handful of pitches, a batted ball never leaving the infield, my strong start was erased—one of the emptiest feelings you can have as a starting pitcher. It feels a little bit like you weren’t there at all. That said, you always want to give a relief pitcher some room when he coughs up one of your leads late in the game. Inside, you’re seething, reeling, but the correct baseball move is to play it cool, pat the guy on the back, tell him you’ll get him next time. And that’s what I did here—went up to Rick as he came off the mound at the end of the inning and tried to pick him up.
I waited a couple days before I started busting his balls—and now, as I write this, it’s been twenty-five years and I’m still busting his balls over this one. Just sayin’.
This strong outing in Kansas City wasn’t the only time I took a no-hitter into the eighth inning. No, I could never quite get it together to pitch my way into baseball history with a complete game no-hitter, but I did manage to throw 11 innings of no-hit ball in college, and to go deep in a bunch of other big league games without letting up a hit. Curiously, improbably, I threw two two-hit shutouts in the span of two weeks in 1992, against the same team, and in both games the no-no was broken up late by the same batter. (What are the odds?) Candy Maldonado of the Toronto Blue Jays, who would go on to beat us A’s in the ALCS later that season on their way to a World Series title, did the dishonor each time out—once in the eighth inning, and once in the seventh. The games were wrapped around a 1–0 complete game loss to the New York Yankees—all in all, a fine and formidable stretch that nevertheless continues to rankle for the way they stand in my rearview mirror as stark reminders of what might have been.
Like the game that got away that night in Kansas City …
* * *
Dann Howitt was a teammate of mine in Oakland, a career .194 hitter who would go on to earn a glorious spot in the annals of baseball history. Perhaps I overstate: it was more of an inglorious footnote, offering an unlikely capper to a Hall of Fame career, but it was memorable just the same.
Dann bounced around the bigs over parts of six seasons. I knew him as a kid from Battle Creek, Michigan—which, like most everyone from my generation, I associated with my favorite Kellogg’s cereal. He was a tall, skinny kid, who could never really crack Tony La Russa’s lineup, but he was one of the smartest guys on that Oakland team. After leaving Oakland, he played for a stretch in Seattle, and for the Chicago White Sox. It was while playing for the Mariners, toward the end of the 1993 season, that he stepped into posterity. Last week of the season, he was in the lineup against Nolan Ryan, who was due to retire at the end of the campaign.
Ryan was still throwing gas, but on this night he struggled to get out of the first inning. He gave up a single to Mariners shortstop, Omar Vizquel, to lead off the game. Vizquel promptly stole second. Ryan then walked the next two hitters, Rich Amaral and Ken Griffey Jr., to load the bases. And then, for good measure, he walked Jay Buhner to push home Vizquel with the first run of the game.
That brought Dann Howitt to the plate with the bases loaded, nobody out. And what did this smart, skinny, light-hitting leftfielder from Battle Creek do in that spot? He sent a 2–2 pitch deep to left for the first (and only!) grand slam of his career … off one of the greatest pitchers to ever take the mound.
What made that moment momentous was that Ryan was pulled from the game while pitching to the next batter—my old Mets teammate Dave Magadan. And, it turned out, that was the last game Nolan Ryan ever pitched, so with that one mighty swing Dann Howitt made himself the answer to a couple of all-time trivia questions.
Pretty cool.
Long as I’m on it, let me just slip in a footnote to this footnote. I wrote earlier that Dann was one of the smartest players on those A’s teams of the early 1990s. But there were a lot of unusually smart players in that clubhouse—perhaps because Tony La Russa himself was pretty damn smart and was drawn to well-rounded playe
rs who could think for themselves and were able to develop interests away from the field. One of the other smart players was our shortstop, Walt Weiss, who would of course go on to become a big league manager—an accomplishment that doesn’t necessarily anoint you with smarts, as we have seen with a few stories I’ve already shared, but it can be a leading indicator.
In Walt’s case, though, the two certainly went hand in hand, and I can remember being made aware of the depth of his knowledge and the size of his memory during an afternoon game when the two of us were seated next to each other in the A’s dugout. Walt was out with an injury at the time, and since I wasn’t pitching or charting there wasn’t much for me to do on the bench, so I was only too happy to sit with him and shoot the shit. I used to love hanging with Walt—he’d grown up in upstate New York, about an hour north of the city, and we were wired in a lot of the same ways. At some point, our talk turned to Bob Dylan—as it was wont to do in the dog days of summer when there’s not a whole lot on the line other than where you might get dinner after the game. Walt let on that Blood on the Tracks was his favorite album, and I agreed that it was one of Dylan’s best. We also agreed that “Tangled Up in Blue” was, like, one of the greatest Dylan songs ever, ever, ever.
Walt said he knew all the words—and to prove it, he started singing. He wasn’t bragging, or showing off, but he was certainly singing. Right there in the middle of the game—not at the top of his lungs, mind you, but loud enough. Our guys were in the field (I think), so the dugout was not as full as it might have been, but it must have been an incongruous thing for anyone else on the bench to turn their attention our way and hear Walt Weiss doing a quite reasonable Bob Dylan cover—a cappella, of course.
I tried to match him line for line, but I fell off somewhere in the first verse, right around that part where Papa’s bankbook wasn’t big enough. Walt kept going, though. All the way through to the end:
All the people we used to know
They’re an illusion to me now …
It was the most remarkable thing—one of my most cherished in-game memories. And it’s a memory that lingers and sweetens with time, because whenever that song plays on the radio I’m taken back to the A’s dugout, and somewhere beneath Dylan’s dense, meandering lyric there’s an image of these two young athletes, playing a game they loved, having the time of their lives, and swapping songs like they were back in high school.
* * *
Gregg Jefferies was an amazing young talent, one of the best switch-hitters I ever saw. Trouble was, he was a kid without a position, and without a sense of humor. He came up to the wrong team at the wrong time. There just wasn’t a good fit for him on those Mets rosters of the late 1980s—playing-wise and personality-wise. Remember how I wrote earlier about how tentative I felt as a rookie? About me not wanting to stand out, or call attention to myself in any way? Well, Gregg wasn’t like that. He’d been a highly touted prospect—the first two-time winner of Baseball America’s Minor League Player of the Year award—and when he joined the club to stick late in our division-winning 1988 season, he seemed to take himself a little too seriously.
He didn’t do tentative, apparently.
Naturally, some of our guys gave Gregg a hard time. They rode him about the self-important way he carried himself, about how he never smiled. They even rode him about that extra “g” at the end of his first name—because, you know, ballplayers. One of the ways Gregg took himself seriously was to carry his own bat bag, something today’s players do all the time, but back in my day was a little unusual. It irritated a lot of our veterans, who as it was didn’t care for the way management was trying to coddle Gregg and shoehorn him into a spot on the field, to where his at-bats would be siphoned from somebody else’s stat line. Gregg could play short, second, or third, and he could play the corner outfield spots, but there was no room at the inn, with our crowded lineup. And it’s not like he could play any of those spots so spectacularly well that we’d be a better defensive team with him in that position, and it didn’t much matter to this arrogant, confident group of tight-knit veterans how highly touted Gregg Jefferies was as a hitter until he actually showed us something at the big league level.
Clearly, there was a good deal of stress and strain as Gregg tried to make a place for himself on the team. That’s where the bats came in. A bunch of my teammates, who shall go nameless, rallied ’round a not-so-harmless prank suggested by one of our singular teammates, who shall go named (Roger McDowell), who put it out there that we should saw Gregg’s precious bats in half and put them back in his bag.
This seemed like a good idea to all concerned—all concerned, that is, except for Gregg Jefferies.
Got to admit, this was pretty funny, if you were aware of the tension that seemed to follow poor Gregg around our clubhouse like a black cloud, but let the record show that I had nothing to do with the bat desecration that followed. I may have known about it (emphasis added), but I was nowhere near the scene of the crime, and as I recall I even tried to stay away from the moment of discovery. It was only later that I heard about Gregg’s furious reaction (which I had on good authority was priceless), and the fallout that came the way of the suspected assailants (which was also not without cost, as I will soon explain). Still, I was somehow fingered as one of the assailants—one of the most embarrassing moments of my career. I was embarrassed because I was being made to answer for the awful mistreatment of a young player who was really just trying to find his way. The coaches asked me about it … reporters asked me about it … for whatever reason, it was generally assumed that I had a hand in it, and I hated how the thought must have made me look in the eyes of others.
The cutting of the bats, in a vacuum, wouldn’t have been that big a deal, because they were easily replaced. No, it was what the bats symbolized to a kid like Gregg Jefferies. They were the tools of his trade, and here the leaders of this professional organization he was desperately trying to crack were not only keeping him from those tools, we were also destroying them. We were trying to break him down. You’ll notice that I used the universal we in those last two sentences—not because I was directly involved, but because I was aware of this cruelty as it was going down and didn’t do a damn thing to stop it.
Yeah, it was funny, but it was also harsh, vindictive, over-the-top, and I would have liked to think that we were all better than that—that I was better than that, at least.
Gregg Jefferies never forgot that Roger McDowell had been the mastermind of this episode, and a couple years later, after Roger had been traded to the Phillies, the friction between them led to a bench-clearing brawl. It was our last home game of the 1989 season, and Roger got Gregg to ground out to the right side of the infield to end the game. As Gregg was running to first, Roger was crossing from the mound, shouting at him. I couldn’t hear what he was shouting, but Gregg surely could, because as soon as he touched the bag and the game was ended he spun on his heels and darted back toward Roger, like a bull charging a toreador. He lowered his head and barreled into him, and the two started going at it, hard and heavy.
If you go back and look at the footage from that game, you can hear the Mets’ legendary broadcaster, Ralph Kiner, in the booth, lending a kind of poetic headline to the proceedings:
He said, “Teammates once. Enemies now.”
Ralph didn’t know the half of it, I don’t think, but what’s interesting to me now in the retelling is the way the situation had flipped. When Gregg came up, those of us who should have known better looked the other way while he was razzed and tormented. Our thinking at the time was that Roger McDowell, his chief razzer-tormentor, was one of us. And now, Roger was in a Phillies uniform, and as much as we might have liked him, as much as the friendships we shared with him as individuals and as a team might have endured, he was in the other clubhouse. Gregg Jefferies was in a Mets uniform. He was in our clubhouse. And when he charged the mound and went at Roger, we fell in right behind him. We ran to the field from the dugout, from the b
ullpen and piled on. Because that’s what teammates do, right? We treat you like shit, but it’s okay because we’re the ones treating you like shit. When our opponents treat you like shit, that’s when we have a problem.
We had Gregg’s back, at last.
On a personal note, I should mention that Gregg’s Mets tenure outlasted my own. I was traded to the Expos during the 1991 season, while Gregg was still trying to establish himself and fulfill all that promise that went with all that high touting. Finally, at the end of the 1991 season, the Mets gave up on him, packaging Gregg with Kevin McReynolds and Keith Miller and shipping them all off to the Royals in exchange for Bret Saberhagen, just two seasons removed from his stunning Cy Young Award–winning season. It was one of the last truly blockbuster trades I can recall, and I mention it here for the way it bumps up against the Rick Honeycutt story I told a couple pages back. After all, it was Keith Miller who broke up the no-hitter I had going in Kansas City, before Rick came on and threw away the 1–0 lead I’d been nursing, which allows me to offer the dubious argument that were it not for this notorious bat-sawing incident, were it not for the struggles of Gregg Jefferies in a Mets uniform, and the decidedly negative energy that attached to his career in New York, that blockbuster Saberhagen trade might never have happened. Keith Miller might have still been playing for the Mets, or perhaps have been traded elsewhere, and he wouldn’t have been in the lineup that night to hit that eighth-inning single and erase my no-hitter.
Here again, even in this circuitous way, it all ties in.
* * *
Stan Jefferson was one of two can’t-miss prospects to emerge from the Mets’ farm system who somehow missed. Herm Winningham was the other. Understand, the can’t-miss designation was mine. Understand, too, there’s probably a reason why I never became a scout or a general manager or a judge of innate baseball talent other than my own, because neither one of these guys ended up with the career I’d imagined for them.