108 Stitches

by Ron Darling

  When you get traded or released, your standing changes in an instant. One moment, you are such a part of your team, and the next you are so not a part of that team. The suddenness, the immediacy, the finality … it can feel awful when you’re on the inside of it. It can be so impersonal—like the stories you hear from the corporate world, when someone gets fired and is swiftly escorted from the building. Someone packs up their belongings and sends it on to them—that’s how badly they don’t want you around after they let you go.

  They don’t even want you to say good-bye.

  On a selfish level, Eddie’s departure changed my life away from the stadium. There were only four of us on that team living in Manhattan at the time—Eddie, Keith Hernandez, Danny Heep, and myself. We had our own little fraternity within the larger Mets fraternity. After every Sunday day game, we’d go to Tokubei on the Upper East Side and eat sushi until we couldn’t breathe, and at some point we’d spill out onto Second Avenue and Keith would do his Mendy Rudolph impersonation in the middle of the street, and we would be doubled up laughing and counting our many blessings and moving about like veritable princes of the city.

  It was a good and meaningful time, inside a good and meaningful time, and Eddie was a key part of that. He was my teammate, my running mate, my hanging-out mate. He was my friend. We were inseparable. And, just like that, he was gone.

  * * *

  Best I can recall, there was only one time I cried on a baseball field during the run of play. I was fourteen years old, struggling through my first year of American Legion ball, alongside mostly high school players, with a couple college kids thrown into the mix. I’d played in Senior Little League at thirteen, my first time playing on a full-size field, with 90-foot bases, but I didn’t really have the arm strength just yet for the big diamond. I could field, and I could hit, but I couldn’t really get enough hop on the throw from shortstop, which had always been my position.

  At fourteen, I’d aged out of the Senior league, so there was really no place else for me to play, and my American Legion manager decided he’d hide my young arm at second base. I wasn’t too happy with that, but I made the adjustment. There were adjustments all around, that first year. I’d always been the best player on my team, the best player in the league, and now I wasn’t. I’d always been able to dominate, and now I couldn’t. Plus, now I had to learn to turn the double play from the other side of the bag—and this was where those tears came in.

  There was a grounder to the left side of the infield, so I crossed to the bag to receive the throw, my back to the runner from first barreling into second. This was a big dude from one of the local colleges, and he played the game hard, like it mattered. He took me out—like, out. I look back on it now and wonder if it was a clean play or a dirty play, but then I remember that when I was a kid there was no such thing as a dirty play. Whatever it was, this college kid cleaned my clock. It ended up, I held on to the ball, but couldn’t make the throw to first, and as I stood and dusted myself off I started choking back tears—not because I didn’t turn the double play, but because I was so shaken up. I hurt all over.

  You know how when you’re a kid and tears start to well up and you’re trying your darndest not to cry but there’s nothing you can do to keep from crying? Well, this was one of those moments, so I immediately tried to cover my tears with the more acceptable tics and gestures of the game. I dabbed my eyes with wrist band. I took off my hat and rubbed my brow. I slapped my glove against my thigh, to distract me from the pain I was feeling almost everywhere else.

  At the end of the inning, I remember jogging back to the dugout thinking, Holy shit, Ronnie, you better not let anyone see you’ve been crying. But, of course, everyone could see I’d been crying. They’d all assumed as much, I guess—I mean, I was a kid, playing with young men. They’d all seen me get the shit kicked out of me on that slide.

  But nobody said anything. I sat by myself in that dugout, embarrassed as hell, and vowed that I would never again let my feelings show on a ball field. Didn’t matter if I was hurt, or sad, or wronged … I would file my emotions away for later.

  And I nearly made good on my vow, except for one time, early on in my professional career, before I’d even made it to the bigs. I’d already been traded from the Texas Rangers organization to the New York Mets. I’d already spent a season in Tidewater—in my day, the Mets’ Triple-A home. My ERA was solid … my won-loss record, not so much. And then our season ended, and a bunch of my Tidewater teammates were getting called up to play out the string with the big club. It was a little bit of a slap in the face, not to be called up, because the Mets were going nowhere. They needed a pitcher. I thought, Gee, I must really suck. I thought, This is fucking bullshit.

  Steve Schryver, the team’s director of minor league operations, took me aside one day in the parking lot to check in with me on this, see how I was doing. It was really great of him, and he said all the right things—said, “Hey, Ron. It’s just not your time, but your time will come. Just keep working hard.” He couldn’t have been nicer or more understanding about it, but I couldn’t hear it at the time. All I heard was that I wasn’t getting called up, and I became emotional. I started to cry, right there in the parking lot, right in front of Steve—like a big baby. Oh my God, I was so embarrassed, so unprofessional.

  So I doubled down on that promise I’d made to myself in my first year of American Legion ball, to keep my emotions to myself. Because, in the end, there might be crying in baseball, but there is no crying in baseball.

  6

  “Q” Is for “Quirk”

  Jamie Quirk was one of my favorite targets as a catcher—an infrequent one, but a favorite just the same. We played together for a couple seasons in Oakland, and he was so earnest and interested in the particulars of the game I found him to be one of my most endearing teammates. I used to love pitching to him. He played with such joy, like it was a blessing for him to be on the field. He’d come to the ballpark early whenever he was due to catch. If it was an afternoon game, he’d be in the clubhouse, fully dressed, by seven or eight o’clock in the morning. Really. For a night game, he’d be good to go by noon. Also, really. He was just so happy to be in the lineup, to be called on to contribute … it’s like he couldn’t wait for the game to start.

  He was my catcher one day, at home, for an afternoon game against the Blue Jays. He was there early, of course, greeted me like a puppy when I arrived an hour or so after him—like I said, endearing as hell.

  After my warm-up, we went over our signs, which were always the same: one finger for a fastball, two for a curve, three for a slider. If he wiggled a finger, that meant he was calling for the change. I didn’t throw a slider, so that left only the one, the two, and the wiggle, so there was not a whole lot of ground for us to cover. And not a whole lot of subterfuge to our system—to be sure, if the New England Patriots scouting staff was in the stands that day, they would have had no trouble stealing our signs.

  I came out firing that afternoon. Everything was working. The Blue Jays hitters couldn’t figure me out, and I was feeling it—just one of those days, you know. Every pitch Jamie called was the perfect pitch, in the perfect spot, and by some divine alchemy delivered by the Bay Area baseball gods, I was executing perfectly.

  Every once in a while it happens that a pitcher and his catcher are so totally in sync that it starts to feel like they’re playing the game at a whole other level. They’re in a zone, dialed-in. The opposing hitters, even your own teammates, fade into the background, and it’s just the two of you, playing catch, telling the ball what you want it to do. That’s what it was like between me and Jamie on this afternoon at Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum.

  He could’ve called anything.

  At some point, late in the game, the A’s up 6–0 and me about to face a couple future Hall of Famers in the Toronto lineup for the fourth time that day, he did. Jamie put down two fingers and gave them a little wiggle—a sign I’d never seen. If I’d stopped
to think about it, I would have had no idea what pitch he was calling for, but there was no thought in what I was doing. I was just doing. If Jamie had stopped to think about it, he might never have flashed that two-finger wiggle. But for that one game at least, the two of us were hardwired to each other in this weird and wonderful way. There was no reason to think.

  Instinctively, I knew Jamie wanted me to throw a slow curveball—like a changeup, with a twist. So I threw it. A couple batters later, he dropped the same sign, so I threw it again.

  After the inning, I went over to him and said, “That’s what you wanted, right?”

  He said, “Absolutely.”

  I said, “I’ve never seen that sign before.”

  He said, “I’ve never given that sign before.”

  And it was like that. Synchronicity, of a kind.

  * * *

  The most unfortunate injury I ever saw on the field?

  That would have to be the time Carlos Reyes was given a spot start for the A’s, pulled a butt muscle on his first warm-up pitch, and had to be ferried to the clubhouse on a stretcher.

  The most amusing aftermath to a most unfortunate injury?

  That would have to be the daily butt-rubbings administered to Carlos by my good friend Barry Weinberg, the A’s trainer, who’d try to get the job done before the clubhouse started to fill with pregame activity. I was closer to Barry than I was to a lot of my A’s teammates, so I used to like to bust his chops. For a trainer, he was a little squeamish about this type of inappropriate touching, so I’d make an effort during the two or three weeks Carlos was rehabbing to get to the ballpark early. I lived by the stadium in those days, so it was nothing for me to wander by when Barry thought the place would be empty—basically, to annoy him. He’d look up from what he was doing and catch me ogling as he furiously rubbed Carlos’s right butt cheek.

  I’d smile and say, “Hey, Barry. How’s it going today?” Trying not to laugh.

  Barry would roll his eyes and say, “Fuck you, R.J.”

  And so it went.

  * * *

  Like Roger McDowell, Dave Righetti wasn’t someone I would have pegged as a future pitching coach or any kind of sage of the game. He was a loose, loopy presence in the clubhouse—probably one of the funniest guys I ever played with, and certainly one of the most fun. He had a head for the game, was a tremendous communicator, but he was also a bit of a nut.

  He showed up at spring training in 1994, and I was surprised to see him. In those days, the news of the day and the front office maneuverings of our team didn’t show up in our phones—our phones were still dumb. We didn’t know shit, until it was right there in front of us—and now, right there in front of me, in Oakland A’s gear, was Dave Righetti.

  I said, “Rags, what are you doing here in camp?”

  We’d known each other from our dovetailing careers in New York, when he was toiling up in the Bronx for the Yankees and I was out in Queens with the Mets. That’s one of the curious side benefits to playing professional ball in a two-team city—you’re connected to your counterparts on the other team like cousins. You wind up drinking in the same bars, attending the same fundraisers, moving in the same circles. I was only too happy to see that in the Venn diagram of the game our circles might overlap yet again.

  He said, “I’m making the team.” Like it was a done deal.

  We got to talking, and I asked him why he was still playing. He’d been in the bigs for fourteen years, had made a bunch of money, had just finished a three-year run with the Giants. He’d truly had a remarkable pitching career. He was the first pitcher to throw a no-hitter and then to lead the league in saves—a feat that was matched by my friend and teammate Dennis Eckersley and, years later, by Derek Lowe.

  I said, “You’d think, a guy like you, it’s time to hang it up.”

  He said, “Jim Deshaies.”

  That’s all—just “Jim Deshaies.” Like I was supposed to figure out what the hell Jim Deshaies had to do with any of this.

  I waited for the rest of it, and here it was: “If that fucking Jim Deshaies is still playing, then I’m still playing.” Beat. “If he can find a team, I can find a team.”

  Just to be clear, Jim Deshaies had been a lights-out pitcher for a stretch for the Houston Astros. In 1986, he set a major league record by striking out the first eight batters to face him in a game, against the Dodgers—a record the Mets’ Jacob deGrom would match twenty-eight years later, against the Marlins. At the end of that same 1986 season, Deshaies was famously left off the Astros’ postseason roster, which I’ve always believed played to the Mets’ advantage in the League Championship Series that year. He was a tough left-hander, always seemed to have our number, and with the way he’d been pitching he would have been a weapon out of the bullpen against some of the big left-handed bats in our lineup. And now here he was, all these years later, fighting for a spot on a big league roster, in a way that left Dave Righetti fighting to keep it going in his own career.

  Rags was funny that way. He told elaborate, you had to be there–type stories, mostly about his time with the wild “Bronx Zoo”–ish Yankees of the early 1980s. One of the great traditions on that team, according to Rags, was the “beach club” he ran on road trips with fellow pitcher Bob Shirley. One guy was in charge of making sure there were enough shorts and bikinis for the invited guests. Another guy was in charge of collecting all the sand from those heavy, stand-up ashtrays you used to find by the elevators and in hotel lobbies. And then someone else was tasked with hauling a couple potted plants from the lobby to decorate the room upstairs. They’d spread the sand on the floor, set up the plants, and hand out the beachwear, and—presto!—it was Spring Break in downtown Cleveland, or wherever.

  The sand on the floor just outside the room was key, because when the local talent came up from the hotel bar downstairs, that’s how they knew where to find the party.

  “We just told ’em we’d see ’em at the beach,” Rags explained.

  * * *

  Joe Sambito came on to mop up during one of the most lopsided losses in Mets history—a night game in June 1985 against a nothing-special Phillies team.

  It was just one of those games—a blowout laugher that can reveal a lot about a team’s character, on either side of the score, and here we learned more than we cared to know about our teammate Calvin Schiraldi, who would leave our ranks in the off-season in the trade that brought Bobby Ojeda from the Red Sox to the Mets. You could make the argument, as I will be doing here, that Schiraldi’s comportment in this nightmare ’85 game against the Phillies might have cost the Red Sox the ’86 World Series.

  Here’s what happened: Von Hayes led off the bottom of the first for the Phillies with a home run off Mets starter Tom Gorman … and it was downhill from there. Tom had gotten the spot start, and he’d been all excited because he would get to swing the bat—something our relievers didn’t get much of a chance to do.

  The thing about Tom was that he liked to talk. A lot. He wouldn’t talk about himself in the third person, like Deion Sanders, but his funny confidence even spilled over to skills at the plate. To hear him tell it, he might just have been the best hitting pitcher since Babe Ruth. He’d played at Gonzaga, and he’d go on and on about his exploits at the plate in college, telling us (a little too loudly) that he’d once hit two home runs in a game. Truth be told, most everyone in the Mets clubhouse who’d played college ball had hit two home runs in a game, including yours truly, but we never called him on it. We just let him blow his smoke, because that’s how he was. It was hilarious to watch.

  We called him Gorfax. I think he took it as a compliment, and none of us were inclined to correct his thinking.

  Before the game that night in Philadelphia, Gorfax sat on the bench, tapping his bat, working the grip, putting it out there that he was going to do some damage at the plate. We should have known we were in for a rough night because he seemed to care more about his at-bats than he did about his spot start, and sure en
ough he never got to take his licks because he didn’t make it out of the first inning. Davey Johnson pulled him from the game with the bases loaded, one out, and three runs already in.

  Schiraldi came on and hit the next batter, and then gave up a grand slam to Von Hayes. (That’s two home runs in the first inning for Von Hayes, for those of you keeping score at home.) We eventually got out of the inning, but Schiraldi got lit up again in the second, giving up a triple, three doubles, and four singles, although to his great credit he did manage to keep Von Hayes in the park and to very nearly get out of the second inning.

  Now, this was where all that character business came in, because when a game gets out of hand there’s a tendency among those players who aren’t actually in the game to get a little loosey-goosey in the dugout. Talk turns to which position players might be called on to pitch, because of course you don’t want to waste a legit arm in one of these situations. But when you’re out there on the field, you’re expected to give it your all—and when you’re on the mound especially, you’re meant to keep pounding the strike zone. There’s a professionalism you want to see from your teammates, especially when you’re taking a beating.

  I didn’t see that out of Calvin Schiraldi on this grim, laughable night in Philadelphia. None of us did. There was a give-up in him that came through in his body language, in his effort, in the look on his face that told us he wanted to be anyplace in the world but out there on that mound. Coming out of this one game, and handing the ball over to Doug Sisk with our guys trailing 16–0 in the bottom of the second, we all started to see Schiraldi as a losing player. Whatever respect we might have had for him going into this game was shot. And it wasn’t just the players who noticed it—team management saw it, too.