by Ron Darling
A good, good guy to have on your side when you went into battle—and a good, good guy to pick up your team when spirits were sagging.
* * *
Mark McGwire was the biggest person I ever played with. He once wrapped his forearm around my neck and head (as a form of greeting, I guess), and all I could think was, Oh my God, this giant is going to crush me with his forearm.
I remember that he was struggling when I joined the A’s midway through the ’91 season. He ended up hitting just .201 that year, his home runs were way down, but his disposition was cheerful, professional. A couple years later, about a month before I was unceremoniously retired by the A’s, I saw him hit three home runs off Boston left-hander Zane Smith in a game at Fenway Park—one of the most amazing individual accomplishments I ever witnessed from the dugout.
I didn’t know the first thing about steroids, and the only performance-enhancing drugs I ever saw being passed around in a big league clubhouse were alcohol and amphetamines, so I have nothing to say on the question of whether Mark or his fellow “Bash Brother” Jose Canseco might have been juicing during their time in Oakland. All I know is that he was a tremendous teammate, with the resilience to bounce back from a dreadful season, and forearms that could have crushed a watermelon.
Or, me.
A word or two on the steroid culture that attached to the game during my playing days—at least, as I came to see it …
You have to realize, when I first started going to the gym at twelve and thirteen years old, to add a pound of muscle to get ready for the football season, there were no kid fitness facilities. There was no yoga, no Pilates, no personal trainers my parents could have hired by the hour to whip me into shape. (As if!) No, everyone from the fifty-something men trying to stay in shape to kids like myself, we all went to the same dank, stinky gym. We all went through pretty much the same motions. And yet it was in these shitty gyms that I first started to notice needles on the bathroom floors, in the trash bins, because you had everybody in there. You had body builders, and big, bruising football players hoping to get recruited into the college ranks. It was a strange atmosphere, and when I figured out what was going on it galled me that some of the older kids I was playing with and against in high school were somehow adding thirty pounds of muscle, while I was doing the very same workouts and could only add that single pound. I came to resent those guys with the perfect abs, pecs, triceps, biceps … but then I filed away that resentment and went about my routine.
I’ve written before about the drug use in the Mets clubhouse during my time there—but, again, as far as I could ever tell the substances that were being abused were limited to amphetamines and alcohol. In Oakland, things were different, and it took me a while to spark to those differences. Understand, I never actually saw any evidence of steroid use during my time in Oakland, like those left-behind needles in the gyms I used to go to as a kid, but there was trace evidence all around.
I’ll explain: I’d always thought of baseball as a talent game—you know, that if you got big and strong and tight, if you weren’t loose and limber, it would hurt your game at some point. You’d somehow mask your talent, keep your body from what it was naturally inclined to do. But what I had come to realize over time was that baseball was really a game of attrition. I can remember walking into clubhouses my entire career and seeing veteran ballplayers slumped in their locker, struggling to lift a cup of coffee. The effort was in getting back out there on that field, day after day. Hanging on, hanging in. Hoping to get just a couple more hits, make a couple more plays. If you were at 215 pounds to start the season, you might step off the scale at 197 pounds in the dog days of August, wondering how the hell you’ll keep the weight on and finish out the season. And to finish it strong? Forget about it. But here in the Oakland clubhouse, there were guys moving around with the same energy they’d felt on Opening Day. They were at one hundred percent, all the time.
That should have been a tell. But it wasn’t … not just yet.
There was a phrase you used to hear a lot in the game: the best players are the ones who keep their dicks hard for six months. That’s a little crude, I know, but it gets right to the point. The greats of the game are the ones who find a way to play at full strength, full throttle … every single day. That’s what steroids could do for you, I was made to realize once I got to Oakland. Like I said, I should have realized it straightaway, but I was a little slow to see what was right in front of me. Instead of slouching in their lockers after a game, my A’s teammates would hit the gym for an hour, almost to a man. It took me a while to put two and two together on this, but there it was. And yet I never reached for those pills, those creams, those needles. Why? Well, in part because I’d always tried to conduct myself on and off the field in ways that would not embarrass my parents. That was a big driver for me—earning and keeping the respect of my family. If my father ever thought I cheated or took drugs to get better at baseball, it would have killed me.
Instead of FOMO (a fear of missing out), I had FOSMOM (a fear of shaming my old man), but alongside of that I was also naive. I stupidly thought that talent would prevail, over time. I believed that the natural way of playing the game, studying the game, honing my game would see me through. That’s the line I’d been fed my entire baseball life, and in the end I thought that if you played the game the right way, the baseball gods would smile upon you. Success would find you, and it wouldn’t come from a syringe or a bottle of pills or a tube of cream. It would come from sweat and effort and an unwavering belief in your own abilities and in the game itself.
What the hell did I know, right?
* * *
Kevin Mitchell was famous in the Mets clubhouse for cutting people’s hair. I loved the guy, but I wasn’t letting him anywhere near me with a pair of scissors.
He’d had a tough childhood, getting in and out of trouble, eventually bouncing from high school to high school in the San Diego area. He had a stepbrother who was killed in a gang-related incident. If it wasn’t for baseball, or sports in general, Kevin used to say, he would have been dead or in jail.
That hardscrabble reputation followed him all the way to New York, where he seemed to love playing to his street kid image. At one point, there was a rumor running through our clubhouse that Kevin had decapitated his girlfriend’s cat—a rumor that was later debunked by Dwight Gooden in his autobiography. I didn’t know whether to buy Kevin’s story at the time, but the Kevin Mitchell I knew wasn’t like that. Yes, he’d had it tough, and he liked to talk a big game, but he was a gentle soul with a heart of gold. And he was an enormous talent. About the best thing you can say about that 1986 Mets team was that we were so good we couldn’t even find a spot in the lineup for a guy who would go on to become a National League MVP. Gary Carter used to call him “World”—as in “All-World,” a nod to the dynamic basketball player World B. Free—because he could play pretty much anywhere on the field, and do pretty much anything.
Once, when he was lighting it up as one of the best players in the game for the San Francisco Giants, Kevin made a barehanded catch in deep left field, off the bat of Ozzie Smith—a play that continues to get a lot of love on YouTube. But the barehanded catch I’ll always remember came on the streets of Kenmore Square, just outside Fenway Park, immediately following Game 4 the 1986 World Series. My first wife, Toni, was mugged coming out of the stadium. She had a lot of money on her at the time—about $800, because we were headed to buy a new television set for my parents—and a couple thugs must have seen her flashing it at some point, because they tailed her and snatched her purse. Kevin took off after these assholes and managed to run them down—a genuine superhero move on his part.
One of my favorite teammates of all time.
* * *
During my time in Oakland, we were visited in spring training by a fitness coach named Mack Newton, a Vietnam veteran. Mack was super-intense—you did not want to fuck around with this guy. He had us do this stretching routine that seeme
d to last for days and days. Really, it took just short of forever to get through his stretching ritual—probably a half hour or so, if you did it right.
(And if you didn’t do it right, you would hear from Mack—better believe it!)
A lot of the guys took this routine pretty seriously. Steve Ontiveros, apparently, was one of them. Steve was a bit of a nut, and when Tony La Russa tapped him late in a game to pinch run, he started in on his stretching routine. La Russa was one of the first managers to regularly deploy one of his pitchers in a pinch-running role, on the theory that you don’t want to waste a position player in a tough spot in a tight game if you’ve got a decent athlete on your staff who might do a serviceable job on the base path. Onto was certainly a decent athlete, to go along with his beautifully enigmatic personality, so he got the nod.
Now, most guys, when they’re called on to pinch run, they’ll maybe run up and down the line a couple times, stretch a little bit, and jog out to the field. But not Steve—he did the full Mack Newton, before he was good and ready. It was an unusually long time before he ran out to the bag—at least ten minutes, a good long while for a garden-variety substitution.
Sure enough, the next batter hit a grounder to the shortstop, and Steve came up lame as he went into the bag at second, ended up pulling his hamstring.
* * *
I can’t skate past Jesse Orosco on this alphabetical list of teammates without mentioning that it was Jesse who stood as the leader of the self-proclaimed “Scum Bunch” on those great Mets teams of the 1980s, which was primarily made up of Jesse, Danny Heep, and Doug Sisk, and tasked with drinking as much beer as possible on our plane trips and bus rides.
Also, it was Jesse who stood up to Frank Howard at the end of the 1983 season, after our manager made another boneheaded move that left us players scratching our heads and challenging each other to say something to him.
Most of the guys were too chickenshit to stand up to Frank, even the wily veterans of our group, who knew their jobs were safe and that Frank’s was somewhat less so.
Finally, the team seemed to turn to Jesse, and somebody said, “You talk to him. You’re the only one who’s having a good year.”
* * *
Craig Paquette played some third base for us out in Oakland, and he’d go on to make a cameo appearance with the Mets later on in his eleven-year career.
I took him aside one day before a game against the Texas Rangers. Juan Gonzalez was in the middle of one of those stretches where you could just not get him out. He was like that, as a hitter, and it fell to us pitchers to look for a hole in his swing or some way to maybe throw some ice on his hot streak.
At this point in my career, I didn’t have a whole lot of weapons at my disposal, so I had to rely on my head to get Gonzalez out, and my head was telling me that I could pitch him down and in.
I gave Craig a heads-up, because if I was pitching Gonzalez down and in that meant he would likely pull the ball on the ground.
I said, “Play as deep as you can, because he’s going to hit that ball about a thousand miles an hour.”
Craig nodded.
I said, “And play on the line, because he’s going to pull it.”
Craig nodded again.
That was how it was with “Juan Gone,” during this one stretch. Even if you found a hole in his swing, he could still find a way to hurt you—like, actually hurt you.
Gonzalez followed the script and ended up driving two or three balls down the line at third, and Craig Paquette, playing deep, fielded them all flawlessly, like it was routine.
After the game, a group of us were sitting in the hotel bar, and talk turned to Craig and what a fine game he’d played. He’d had a big hit for us, too, so he was really one of the stars of the game. As we were talking, Craig happened to walk in, so we motioned for him to join us.
I was sitting with Tony La Russa and Doug Rader and a couple other coaches, because at that stage in my career I had more in common with the old guys on the team than I did with most of the young players.
I said, “Craig, that was some game you played today. Can I buy you a drink?”
He resisted at first—said, “No, no, I’m good.” Because the last thing you wanted to do as a young player was to sit for a drink with the coaches and the wily veterans—it might’ve messed with your cred.
One of the coaches pressed him on it—said, “Goddamn it, kid. A game like that, you deserve a drink.”
So Craig relented and turned to the bartender and ordered a piña colada.
Doug Rader heard that and pounded his fist on the bar—said, “You’ll have a what?”
Craig sheepishly repeated his drink order—said, “I’ll have a piña colada.”
“The fuck you will,” Doug Rader shot back. “What the fuck kind of drink is that? No major league ballplayer orders a piña colada.”
Of course, this was the same Doug Rader who’d been a teammate of Jim Bouton’s on those rabble-rousing Houston Astros teams of the late 1960s, the same Doug Rader who was famously called out in Ball Four for taking a shit on a teammate’s birthday cake, so when a guy like that tells you a piña colada is somehow beneath your station as a major league ballplayer, you turn tail and retreat from the bar without waiting for your drink to arrive.
Which was precisely what Craig Paquette did.
* * *
Alejandro Peña was a terrific Dominican pitcher who had a couple great years out of the bullpen for the Dodgers, the Mets, and the Braves, but I’ll always remember him as the guy with the best clubhouse nickname. For some reason, we all called him “Dirty, Stinky, Rotten, Filthy Al Peña.” I never knew why—he wasn’t dirty, stinky, rotten, or filthy. But that’s what we called him, in full.
And, best of all, he answered to it.
5
Some Crying in Baseball
Sometimes a ballplayer gets his legs cut out from under him before he gets a chance to find his footing. Or the bat taken out of his hands.
Case in point: Jose Oquendo, who went on to have some excellent years for the St. Louis Cardinals, was a teammate of mine at Tidewater. He made it to the Mets at nineteen, didn’t speak a whole lot of English, didn’t really have a support system in place. It’s hard enough making it to the bigs and fitting yourself in without having to deal with a language barrier, a cultural barrier, or any of a long list of barriers to keep you from feeling like you belong. He got his call-up ahead of mine, and had played most of the season with the Mets by the time I finally joined the club in September 1983.
Jose could play. To my eye, he looked like a young Ozzie Smith. A cannon for an arm. Soft hands. Excellent range. I wasn’t the only one who saw his tremendous potential. He was a natural at short—a joy to watch, really. The knock on Jose, early on, was that he wasn’t much of a hitter, and this was certainly true—but then, look at Ozzie’s numbers from his first couple seasons. A lot of guys take a while to catch up to big league pitching, to figure some things out, and yet they still manage to keep their spot in the lineup because of their glove. And so it was with Jose. He was widely regarded as the Mets’ shortstop of the future—and not by default, because there was no one better to assume the position. No, this was a kid with a sky-high ceiling, and I was only too happy to get to take the mound once again and have him playing behind me in the field. When you pitch for a living, it’s a good and reassuring thing to know you’ve got guys behind you who can play.
Trouble was, Frank Howard was the manager of the present, and he was worried about his own future. We were at the butt end of another in a too-long string of miserable Mets seasons, and it was pretty clear to most people who followed the team that Davey Johnson was the manager of the future, but Frank was hanging on, digging in. He was one of those baseball lifers who needed to stay on in the game, whether for the money or the attendant fame or some combination of both. He was desperate to make a case for himself, determined to win ball games, and here we were, playing out the string, the dugout filled with
September call-ups, while he was doing his impression of managing his ass off.
It was the bottom of the third, at Shea, and our guys were feeling hitterish. We had an early rally going. Jose had already taken a little bit of the steam from a second inning rally, when he came up with runners on first and third, nobody out, the Mets up 1–0 against Andy Hawkins and the San Diego Padres. Bob Bailor had singled in a run with an infield hit and immediately stole second, igniting a meager Sunday crowd of nine thousand. But then Jose struck out looking to take the shine off the inning, and we went into the bottom of the third up by that same 1–0 score. Here again, we got a bunch of people on base, batted all the way around to Jose in the eighth spot in the order, runners on first and second. Two outs. Two runs in. A chance, I guess, to get a meaningful start on what was an otherwise meaningless game. But a chance as well for Jose to maybe redeem himself a little bit, and fight his way out of another pressure-filled situation without a whole lot of actual pressure. This is how you shake the green from a young player; you put him through his sometimes-difficult paces and let him battle. You let him show you what he’s got, or figure it out for himself. But that’s not exactly how Frank Howard handled things in this particular spot. Instead, he sent in Rusty Staub to pinch hit. In the bottom of the third inning! It was a witless, heartless, gutless move on the manager’s part, and everyone on the bench ached for Jose in just that moment. He was a good kid, enormously talented, and we all felt for him. The fans, too, sprinkled about the stadium, seemed a little stunned by the move.
Granted, Rusty was probably the game’s premier pinch hitter at that time. He’d had an amazing ’83 season for the Mets, and he’d go on to have an amazing ’84 season, but he didn’t belong in this game, bottom of the third. And, professional that he was, consummate teammate that he was, he knew it. But he grabbed a bat, stepped to the plate, and popped out to second base to end the inning.