108 Stitches

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108 Stitches Page 14

by Ron Darling


  Mookie was a class act, and I wasn’t, and he stood from where he was sitting on the bus and walked back to my row. I could tell by the look on his face that he’d heard what I said. He did not look happy—and one thing about Mookie, if you ever watched him play or give an interview, he always looked happy.

  He leaned into my seat and spoke to me privately—said, “Ron, I heard what you said. I expect more of you than that.”

  And that was that. He didn’t wait for a response from me—just cut me with this respectful and altogether superior one-liner. Frankly, I was tongue-tied, couldn’t have come up with the right thing to say if he’d given me the rest of the bus ride to think of it.

  He walked back to the front of the bus and sat back down in his seat, leaving me to sit and stew in my embarrassment. Happily, mercifully, I found a way to apologize to him afterward, and many times since, and I offer yet another apology here in these pages.

  Mookie was right, after all. I was better than that. And so was he.

  * * *

  For my last entry in this alphabetically themed portion of the book, I look to Lewis Yocum, a protégé of Frank Jobe, a pioneer of the Tommy John surgical procedure that has prolonged the careers of hundreds of major league ballplayers. Dr. Yocum was the West Coast orthopedic specialist working with Dr. Jobe, and he was also the team physician for the California Angels for a number of years.

  I went in to see him early on in 1992, after I’d been rocked in back-to-back-to-back starts against the Twins, Indians, and Blue Jays—allowing five earned runs each time out, without ever making it through the fifth inning. Something wasn’t right, and I was starting to think it was the beginning of the end for me as a pitcher. In golfer’s terms, when I was traded from the Mets in the middle of the 1991 season, it felt to me like I was at the turn and headed for the back nine.

  When you’re an athlete—specifically, when you’re an athlete who relies on his arm and a precision-tuned throwing motion that has been grooved into routine—you can tell when you’re injured, when you’re no longer the same. You don’t need a diagnosis or a second opinion … and yet here I was, seeking a diagnosis and a second opinion, on the off chance that a medical professional might set me right.

  I still had a couple holes I was meant to play.

  Dr. Yocum sat me down on his examination table and reached for my elbow, played around with it a little. After about three hot seconds, he turned to me and said, “You have a serious issue here.”

  I nodded—said, “Tell me about it.” With an attitude, you know.

  Dr. Yocum was used to giving athletes difficult news, so he was patient with me, gave me the time I needed to get my head around what he was saying. He said he wanted to take an X-ray to be certain, but suggested I needed Tommy John surgery to repair the ligament in my elbow, and here my attitude softened, but only a little. My back was still up, however, because I stiff-armed the idea of surgery. In those days, the surgery meant at least a full year of rest and rehab, with no guarantees of a successful outcome—I wasn’t liking the odds, or the ordeal that came with them. I weighed where I was in my career and what I’d accomplished, against where I was going and what there was still to accomplish, figured it had been a pretty good run: eight full seasons, a hundred-plus wins, a thousand-plus strikeouts, ten shutouts … a World Series ring! I imagined my stat line in the Baseball Encyclopedia and decided it was about what I deserved, about what I’d imagined.

  I said, “Well, if I’m really at the end, Doc, I’m not going to have the surgery.”

  He was surprised, I think, by the certainty in my voice—said, “You’ll be pitching with a compromised ligament. It could go at any time.”

  I said, “I’m already pitching with a compromised ligament.” (Again with the attitude.)

  I left Dr. Yocum’s office that day just a little more informed than I’d been going in, and yet stitching a diagnosis to my struggles and knowing I had a career-threatening injury was an enormously liberating thing. In my head, that’s how I chose to play it. No, it wasn’t an approach that would work for everybody, but I told myself that I would go back out there and throw as hard as I could until my arm fell off. I would find a way to get people out … until I couldn’t. Whatever it was that had me out of alignment, I would work my way through it. And do you know what? It freed me from worry, made me realize I’d been tentative on the mound, unwilling to push myself to any kind of limit.

  The upshot: I was able to reinvent myself as a pitcher on the back of that visit to Dr. Yocum. I became more of an artist, and less of a thrower. I played with my delivery, adjusted my arm angle, added a bunch of new pitches to my arsenal—like a slow curveball I’d always been afraid to throw in a game situation. It was almost like free-form jazz, the way I started approaching each trip to the mound, each hitter, each situation. For years, I’d been throwing one way, playing music one way, and now with the knowledge that this ligament in my elbow could rupture with each toss, I was free to improvise … to find my way in an entirely new way.

  I was making it up as I went along.

  It was so cool. It reminded me of that great scene in the movie The World According to Garp, based on the John Irving novel, where Robin Williams is out with a Realtor looking at houses, and as he arrives at this one house he watches as a small plane crashes into the roof and then announces that he’ll take it. The house is already disaster-proof, he says—and that’s how Dr. Yocum’s diagnosis left me feeling. Not like I was invincible, exactly, but like I knew what lay in wait, like there was nothing left for me to do but keep at it. Like nothing bad could happen—nothing worse, anyway, than I’d already imagined.

  And so I kept at it.

  And here’s the thing: I turned my year around with this new mind-set. I did. I started pitching with abandon, strung together a bunch of strong starts, managed to go 14–8 the rest of the season, shaving almost two full runs off my ERA from the time of my visit with Dr. Yocum. Somewhere in there, I even put together that three-game sequence I wrote about earlier, against the Blue Jays, Yankees, and Blue Jays. Three complete games—two two-hit shutouts, bracketing a hard-luck 1–0 loss.

  (For the record, one of those shutouts was the synchronicity game I pitched to Jamie Quirk.)

  It would be the last great season of my career, and it was enough to earn me the last big contract of my career … and to help my Oakland teammates to the top spot in the American League West and my last appearance in the postseason.

  (We lost to the Blue Jays in the AL Championship Series, which back then was just known as the playoffs.)

  Let me tell you, it’s a fine and fitting thing that this tour through my digest of former teammates lands on Dr. Yocum, for the way his diagnosis offered up a kind of grace note to my career, and gave me the permission I needed to pitch like an artist instead of just as an athlete. I wish I’d given myself the freedom to pitch in this way when I was twenty, when I was twenty-five, when there was the kind of life in my arm that would have stood as a formidable counterweight to this new sense of immediacy and creativity. I like to think I would have dominated, in ways I could never have imagined—but then, I came to pitching late, so I guess it would have taken me all this time anyway to mature in my approach. You need all those seasons to become well and truly seasoned, yes?

  All along, my greatest assets as a pitcher had been my competitiveness and my athleticism—and the thing of it is, neither of those have a thing to do directly with pitching. The art of pitching … the craft of pitching … those elements came to me later, and in a lot of ways they came to me once I was able to shed this fear I didn’t know I was carrying about throwing too much, too hard, too … whatever.

  And so, I am ever grateful to Dr. Lewis Yocum, the noted orthopedic surgeon who helped me to salvage my career without lifting a scalpel—simply by gifting me the freedom to become the pitcher I was meant to be all along.

  7

  Head Games

  The thing about baseball is that
it catches the light of how we live and reflects it back to us in meaningful ways. We get out of it what we put into it, and even though on the surface it might seem like the game is about these groupings of singularly talented athletes coming together to outhustle, out-wit, outperform these other groupings of singularly talented athletes, it’s really about the human condition. It’s about the flaws we discover in our character as we set about our days, how we get past them over the long slog of the season, how we don’t … and, ultimately, how we adjust to the game’s disappointments and try to set things right.

  And—get this!—if we don’t set things right and find a way to win, we content ourselves with the notion that there’s always next year, so the game is also about renewal, redemption, rediscovery … good things all.

  Forgive, please, these wistful musings on the meaning and measure of baseball, but as I look back on the characters I’ve met in a hundred baseball clubhouses I find myself thinking of the ways we prop up our hero athletes and ask them to stand as exemplars, role models. Alas, things are not always as they seem. One of the great gifts of my time as a broadcaster is the way it’s opened me up to the narrative of the game, and I’ve come to realize that for every story of uplift and triumph there is one of struggle and loss. As a player, you tend to look at your teammates in simple terms: can he help you or hurt you?… lift you up or set you back?… amaze you or infuriate you? As a fan, it’s much the same. You tend to forget that each and every player on the field has made it to the bigs after a young lifetime of being the very best at each stop along the way. They are who they have become because they have come to believe they can do no wrong. Or, at least, that’s how it’s always been … until the game changes things up on them, for it is in these upper reaches of the sport, playing alongside the best of the best, the toppermost of the poppermost, that ballplayers are no longer able to make things happen on the field simply by willing them so.

  The other team is trying, too, remember? And it sometimes works out that their best is a little better than your best.

  It’s only after all these years in the broadcast booth, calling game after game, season after season, that I have come to appreciate the personalities on display, and the pressures ballplayers are under to play to the backs of their baseball cards and justify their big contracts. We might strut and bluster and move about the base paths like world-beaters, but there are weaknesses in the armor, all around. What’s curious to me is that between the foul lines of a baseball diamond, where all these elite athletes meet to do their thing, you can still expect to find the same collection of quirky, nervous, compulsive behaviors you’ll see in the rest of the wide, wide world, where everyday folks are made to shoulder the workaday stresses of everyday living. Professional baseball players are no different from anyone else. They fuss and fret and fight their own personal demons—with the one key difference being that they do these things on a very public stage.

  I suppose I knew all of this as a player, but it’s taken a second lifetime of watching the game for me to appreciate what’s been right in front of me all along. Yep, there’s a reason teams employ sports psychologists and motivational instructors to make sure their players’ heads are screwed on straight. Indeed, behavior that might appear anywhere else as odd or slightly off can strike you as very odd and way, way off when it happens on a major league baseball field. I was reminded of this the very first time I took the mound in a big league game. I warmed up in the bullpen that day with Ron Hodges, who’d so humiliatingly welcomed me to the team with that disgusting wad of tobacco spittle just a few days earlier. The tradition, then as now, was for the backup catcher to get the starting pitcher warm. The starting catcher would then step in as you were finishing your warm-ups and take you the rest of the way. Junior Ortiz was the catcher on the day—a light-hitting backstop with a gun for an arm and a world-class glove. Junior had a season or two on me, but we were about the same age, and I was grateful to have him behind the plate for my major league debut instead of Hodges. The last thing I needed, with everything else swirling through my head as I made my first-ever start, was to have to work with a full-of-himself veteran who believed the rookies in his midst deserved to be treated like shit.

  Plus, Junior was a much stronger defensive catcher … so there was that.

  One thing about Junior, though—his English was lousy, and when he tried to power past the language barrier he fell into a serious stutter. I hate to even mention it, because it was just a simple speech impediment, brought about by nerves—and, perhaps, the feeling that because he couldn’t speak the language he was somehow less than. And yet it was almost comical, the way Junior would wrestle with the words in his mouth. You could fry an egg in the time it took him to finish a sentence. I’d only been around the clubhouse for a couple days, but already I could see the other guys giving him a hard time about it—ballplayers not being the most sympathetic bunch, I guess. Let it be said, the razzing Junior received was far gentler than the razzing meted out by Ron Hodges and his ilk. It was more benign, more good-natured. The guys would bust Junior’s balls, but only a little.

  Anyway, I’d picked up on all of this, and found myself playing into it, so when Junior came out to the mound to get me settled before the start of the game, I waited for him to say what he’d come out to say. And then I waited some more. Poor Junior just couldn’t get the words out. It’s like his tongue had been taped to the roof of his mouth—that’s how much difficulty he was having speaking.

  Finally, I turned to him and said, “Junior, just fucking spit it out, will ya?”

  He laughed—like a full-bodied, belly laugh—and after that the words started to flow. I’d let the air out of the situation and he was good to go. And it turned out that all he’d come to the mound to tell me was to relax and to wish me good luck, so it hardly seemed worth the trouble.

  Wasn’t like me, to make fun of someone for having a stutter, but this was baseball. This was where you learned there was no room for imperfection of any kind.

  We were the best of the b-b-b-b-b-best, after all.

  * * *

  Years later, after I’d been traded to Oakland, I played alongside another athlete with a notable nervous tic—the right-handed pitcher Steve Karsay—only in this instance the twitch that had attached to him had somehow morphed into an asset. Steve was a hard-throwing rookie during my second full season with the A’s—a kid from Queens who looked to all the world like he was headed for a huge career. In fact, he’d go on to grab a curious place in Mets history, when he gave up the historic post-9/11 home run to Mike Piazza that fairly ignited Shea Stadium and helped to lift the pall that had hung over New York City since the collapse of the Twin Towers.

  Steve managed to put together a formidable career as journeyman pitcher, mostly in middle relief, going on to pitch for four additional teams before returning to the A’s for one swan song season. But he earns a spot in these pages for a strange throwing motion he’d developed that really stood out. He had this unorthodox way of holding a runner on first—I’d never seen anything like it. He would look behind him, over his back shoulder. Picture it: as a right-hander, Steve’s body would be facing third base when he went into his stretch. Every other right-handed pitcher in the game would look down his chin and peer over his left shoulder toward first base, to keep an eye on the runner. But Steve would come set and look back toward second base, over his right shoulder, sneaking a peak at the runner on first out of the corner of his right eye. It was the kind of subtle difference a typical fan might not notice at first, but we pitchers sure noticed. The coaching staff, too. They tried to get Steve to undo a lifetime habit, but he couldn’t shed his routines. The motion was built into his hardwiring by this point, to where when he tried to hold the runner on in the conventional way, he couldn’t jump-start his delivery and throw to the plate with his usual accuracy or velocity. And, if the runner on first was looking a little too runner-ish, Steve had a tough time going into his pickoff move.

&
nbsp; It might have made all the sense in the world for him to look down and forward, but he was cut in this different way. He was stuck.

  Nowadays, I see right-handed pitchers look over their back shoulder all the time when they’re holding a runner on, because they’ve discovered it offers a wider field of vision. This is the asset that came about on the back of Steve’s one little oddity, and I can certainly appreciate how holding a runner on in this way can open up the entire left side of the infield and allow you to check runners on second and third as well. But in Steve’s day, which started at the end of my day there was no one else holding runners on in quite this way, so it was seen as a behavior in need of modification.

  A final few words on that post-9/11 game: recall, the Braves had taken a one-run lead in the eighth, and Steve came on to start the bottom half of the inning. With one out, he walked Edgardo Alfonzo, and then he gave up the dinger to Mike Piazza—probably one of the most iconic home runs in team history. With that one swing, Mike helped to lift the spirit of the city, and to keep the Mets’ slim playoff hopes alive in the last weeks of the season.

  I remember feeling for Steve, because I knew full well what it was like to give up a meaningful, scene-shaping home run. But, knowing Steve and his Queens roots, I imagine it was an emotional moment for him as well, to see his city start to heal in this unexpected way, from a kind of front-row seat he hadn’t really sought. No, he wasn’t rooting for Mike Piazza or the Mets in this spot, but I’m sure there was a part of him, deep down, that couldn’t help but stand and cheer.

  * * *

 

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