108 Stitches

by Ron Darling

  After having been somewhat coddled as a ballplayer in my time at Yale, I could see that my tour of duty in the Texas League would be a comedown wrapped inside a letdown and served with a side helping of an emotional beatdown. Forget the ramshackle surroundings and the general shit show that greeted us as we played out our schedule—it was the miserable way I was treated by my Tulsa teammates that would stamp my first professional season. Nobody said as much, but I could see straightaway that I was in for a bit of a hazing—with an extra layer or two of benign cruelty kicked my way in consideration of the fact that I was the Rangers’ first-round draft choice. Apparently, my first-round status entitled me to change into my uniform while seated on the cement floor in the middle of that Shreveport locker room, and to lay out my things beneath a ratty picnic table.

  (The actual lockers were reserved for the veteran players and our later-round draft picks who somehow hadn’t landed on the same shit list next to my name.)

  My lowly status as a top draft pick also meant I didn’t rate a berth on the sleeper bus we rode, for the long hauls to Little Rock and Amarillo and Jackson, Mississippi.

  It would have been nice if there was some sort of guardian angel on hand to give me the lay of this particular land, but I was left to figure it all out for myself. Tom Burgess helped—not a lot, but some. He was substantially older than his players—in his mid-fifties—so he operated at some remove from the usual shenanigans and rituals. No, he wasn’t about to assign me a locker, or help me find a place to sleep on one of our twenty-hour bus rides … that would have gone against baseball code. But he was quick to smile, and to pat me on the back, and to offer up some heartfelt words of encouragement like, “Hang in there, kid.”

  He was also quick to pull out a deck of cards, which was the way he and some of the coaches passed the time on the bus or in the locker room—the age-appropriate (and era-appropriate!) version of the video games ballplayers distract themselves with today. Tom taught me how to play both Hearts and Spades, and I was an eager pupil. I’d grown up in a card-playing household, but for some reason we’d never played Hearts or Spades in my family—Pitch was our game, growing up—so this was new ground for me. I picked them both up pretty quick, and I got pretty good at them, too—good enough to make those overnight rides pass a little more quickly, because my asshole teammates still weren’t letting me sleep on the bus.

  Let me tell you, there’s nothing quite so thrilling as the sight of a sunrise over Midland, Texas, as you pull into town knowing you’ll have a couple hours to stretch out on the cement floor of that stadium and maybe catch a couple winks before game time.

  In the Texas organization, our Double-A outpost in Tulsa was a kind of breeding ground for Ranger prospects. We had a lot of good young players on that team who’d go on to have decent major league careers: Pete O’Brien, who played first base for the Rangers for a stretch; George Wright, soon to be the team’s center fielder; and Tom Henke, who became one of the game’s top closers during his time with Toronto.

  Looking back, I think the guys were a little rougher on me than they might have been in any other year, because when I joined the Drillers for the second half of the season, our big league counterparts were out on strike. Since there was no baseball at the major league level, the Rangers’ beat writers didn’t have a whole lot to write about, so I received an inordinate amount of coverage as the team’s #1 pick.

  I didn’t ask for the attention, didn’t particularly want it, but there it was—unnecessary roughness, of a kind—and every time a story appeared in one of the papers the older players took it as a signal to ratchet up the benign cruelty, which basically meant I could never count on sleeping anytime soon. Or changing in front of an actual locker. Or being served anything better than scraps whenever we sat (or, in my case, stood) for a team meal.

  I remember being on the receiving end of all manner of pitying looks that summer from Tom Burgess, who seemed to really want to help me navigate the situation, but he was powerless to do so without upending the forces of good and evil that govern the geopolitical system of professional baseball. He could only flash a smile of encouragement, shuffle the deck of cards he seemed to always have at the ready, and deal me in.

  It felt to me at times like I was in some Darwinian struggle, where I had only to survive these minor nuisances if I meant to make it to the next rung on the baseball ladder.

  I just needed to figure it out, ride it out, in what ways I could.

  * * *

  My first year in the Mets organization was a complete waste of time. I don’t think I realized it in the moment, but I was a bit of a mess, my head probably someplace else—Texas, most likely. You have to realize, I was brand spanking new to the business of professional baseball. I’d barely had time to wrap my head around the idea that I’d be playing for the Rangers, and now I had to process that I’d been traded from the organization that had drafted me, so it was a bit of an adjustment.

  I was assigned to the Mets’ Triple-A team in Tidewater, which as I wrote earlier was managed that year by Jack Aker, a former big league pitcher who’d had some good years with the A’s and Yankees. Actually, managed is not exactly the right word in this context—it was more like Jack Aker presided over the team that year. He didn’t do a whole lot of managing that I could see. He was just kind of there.

  Frankly, I don’t think Jack was too happy to have me in his rotation, because my arrival pushed one of the arms he’d been counting on to the Mets’ Double-A franchise, but Aker never said as much. As I also wrote earlier, he never said much of anything. For the entire season. He was the only person in baseball who was horrible to me—like, actively horrible. Here again, that might not be the best word. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say he was passively horrible, because all he did was give me the cold shoulder. He essentially ignored me the whole time I played for him. Really, I cannot recall one conversation I had with this man … not one. And the curious thing was he was recently divorced and had a girlfriend back then who was around a lot of the time, and she couldn’t have been nicer to me. We used to have these great conversations, and as we talked I’d wonder what this great woman was doing with this asshole of a manager.

  * * *

  I’ve already shared a story or two about Frank Howard, my first big league manager when I was called up in 1983, but I’ve yet to mention George Bamberger, the Mets skipper at the start of the season. The team got off to a dreadful start that year—16–30, when Bamberger announced his resignation.

  I never played for Bambi, but he had two of the all-time great lines when reporters chased him down for note and comment on his Mets tenure.

  When asked why he was stepping away from the Mets job, he said, “I think I’ve suffered enough.”

  And when asked what he was going to do next, he said, “I’m going fishin’.”

  I remember thinking, That about covers it.

  * * *

  I had almost no relationship with Montreal manager Tom Runnells. For years and years I hadn’t even thought about him, or my time in an Expos uniform in 1991 until I sat down to write this book, and even then he didn’t come immediately to mind. The first time I scratched my head to see if I could come up with an anecdote to attach to my Expos career or my relationship with my manager there, I actually wrote down Buck Rodgers’s name in this little notebook I kept with stories for this book. That’s how little I remember from my time in Montreal.

  Now, in fairness to me, Tom had replaced Buck as the Expos manager about a month before I arrived in Montreal, and I’d been led to believe that the trade to Montreal was a kind of stopgap maneuver after a planned three-way trade with the Mets-Expos-A’s had failed to materialize, so I guess I put the whole experience out of my mind. Truth be told, it was never really in there in any kind of consequential way. For the two weeks I played for the Expos, my head was someplace else. At the time, I could never get a clear answer on what was going down, and what kind of snag may or may not have be
en hit in these talks that left me dangling in the Great White North, but I kept hearing whispered comments like, “I wouldn’t unpack if I were you” and “Don’t bother learning French”—which, taken together, left me thinking some other cleat was about to be dropped on my career.

  Nothing against the great city of Montreal, or the Expos fans, but it felt to me like I was in limbo there. Too, it felt like I was unwanted. No one in the Expos organization knew quite what to do with me, what to make of me—and, in turn, I had no idea what to do with myself, or how I fit.

  If I even fit at all.

  I should mention here that one of the universal truths of the game is that when a player is released or traded, there’s a tendency to block the moment from memory. It’s like you’re hit by Will Smith or Tommy Lee Jones with one of those neuralyzer devices from Men in Black, and you can’t remember shit. I happen to remember in great detail the moment I was released from the A’s and was pushed to call it a career, because it happened to be my birthday and there were so many other moving parts to consider, but here when Frank Cashen called me in to tell me the Mets were trading me to Montreal, it’s all a blur. I can remember six of my Mets teammates walking with me to Frank’s office in a show of support, each of us knowing I was like a dead man walking, but after that I’ve got nothing. I couldn’t tell you what Frank said, if there was anyone else from the Mets front office in the room with us … nothing. When I walked out, I was so dazed I don’t think I could have even told you which team I’d been traded to.

  Understand, I was a seasoned, hardened professional athlete by this point. It was nearly ten years since the last time I’d been traded, and I’d seen dozens of players come and go in all that time since. I knew this was how the game was played off the field. And, somehow, I knew enough to get myself to Montreal, where I was scheduled to make my next start on my usual rest.

  And yet, that was all I knew, just then. And it’s still all I know, except that the one start I thought I’d make for the Expos turned into another. And then another. The first start was in Montreal, and the next two were on the road. I pitched miserably—to a 7.41 ERA—and it was made clear to me that I wasn’t in the team’s plans.

  Mercifully, I never made it back to Montreal after the one road trip I went on with the Expos. I was traded to the A’s while we were in San Francisco, for two minor league pitchers, so I made the short trek across the bay to join my new team, where I told myself I belonged—and where, in fact, I would go on to post some of the best years of my career.

  One footnote to my time in Montreal: I have only one specific memory of any of my Expos teammates, or any of the interactions we shared during my two weeks with the club. Ron Hassey was a veteran catcher, finishing out the string on his own career when I breezed through town, and he sought me out almost as soon as I arrived in the clubhouse. He wasn’t looking to talk baseball, or to welcome me to the team, however. No, he just wanted to know if I played golf—not because he wanted to invite me to play a round with him at the next opportunity, but because he had a little sideline business going, selling golf balls.

  Yep … that about summed up my Canadian sojourn, and thanks to Ron Hassey I came away from those two “lost” weeks thinking I was more valuable to my teammates as a potential customer than I was as a potential teammate.

  * * *

  One of the things the Mets are lousy at is honoring the team’s past. All across baseball, organizations trot out their stars for Old Timers’ Day ceremonies or throwback events to commemorate a meaningful franchise milestone, but I’ve come to the sad realization that the team’s current owners might just believe the Mets’ history began when they bought out Nelson Doubleday. And yet even in my day, long before the Wilpons took over the team, former players didn’t really pass through our clubhouse the way they did, say, at Yankee Stadium, or the way they did when I played in Oakland, where those great A’s teams of the 1970s were treated like royalty.

  This meant that if you were a student of the game and you were playing or broadcasting for the Mets, you had to do a lot of your studying away from the field. And you had to take your brushes-with-greatness where you could find them, because you just didn’t get the same opportunities to connect with these old-timers at Shea Stadium or Citi Field as you might have if you were toiling in any other ballpark, for any other team.

  Willie Mays, Duke Snider, Warren Spahn, Richie Ashburn … a lot of these all-time greats who might have had their all-time greatest years elsewhere never really passed through Shea during my playing days. This was, and remains, a shame. Of course, there were exceptions—Yogi Berra among them. Yogi wasn’t exactly a fixture in our clubhouse, but he was an occasional presence, especially during his famous feud with George Steinbrenner when he vowed never to set foot in Yankee Stadium. Happily, Yogi had some serious Shea pedigree—he’d finished his playing career with a couple cameo appearances for the Mets in 1965, and managed the team during its storied run to the 1973 World Series—so he got his baseball fix across town, where he was always welcome.

  My favorite Yogi memory found me away from the stadium, though, and I’m afraid it’s not the most flattering. It’s a memory my son Jordan would like to forget—and I suspect someday, after years of therapy, he will. We were playing in Yogi’s golf tournament out in New Jersey. Jordan was maybe eight or nine years old at the time. It wasn’t one of those father-son tournaments, where you might expect to see a lot of kids in tow, but Jordan was a terrific golfer, more than able to hold his own in our foursome. I was only too happy to be able to bring him along with me. At lunch, Yogi came and sat at our table, and told every story under the moon. Jordan was like a pig in shit—he was a mad baseball fan back then, so he drank these stories in. As his father, it was a wonderful thing to see him so connected to my world in this way, and to the men who helped to make my world what it was. It was pretty cool, too, to see him out on the golf course, smacking the hell out of the ball, and pushing us oldsters around—he actually won a couple holes, as I recall.

  It was only after our round that Jordan’s age began to show. He was confident as hell about his ability, but a little shy about some of the other aspects of the game—specifically, about being in the locker room with a bunch of strangers. I can understand that now, although I wasn’t thinking along these lines at the time. It had been a ridiculously hot day, and our shirts were soaked through, so I insisted Jordan hit the showers before we sat down for the dinner and drinks portion of the event. I’d brought along a change of clothes for him, wanted him to look presentable.

  He said, “Dad, I’m not taking a shower with all these old guys.” Like, there was no way in hell.

  I said, “Jordan, it was a hundred degrees out there. You’re all sweaty. We’ve got to clean up before dinner.” Like he was absolutely going to listen to his father on this.

  He said, “It makes no sense for me to shower and put on the same sweaty clothes.” Like he wasn’t going down without a fight.

  I showed him the nice clean clothes I’d brought for him to wear to dinner—clean socks and underwear, too!

  He said, “Dad!” He said it in that voice kids use when they’ve run out of argument but want to put it out there that there’s just … one … more … thing—a thing he couldn’t quite put into words.

  I might be a dumb jock, but I’m not an idiot, so I finally figured it out. Naturally, Jordan was embarrassed to walk around naked in the locker room with all these guys, so I brought him back to see that the shower stalls were curtained in a way that he could have his privacy. After a while, Jordan got comfortable with the idea, and when he was good to go I handed him his clean clothes and he disappeared behind the curtain to do his thing.

  It was when he was finished that he came full in the face with an image that continues to haunt him. There, in the next stall, completely naked, behind no curtain at all, was our host. And he wasn’t just standing there. No, he was bending over to pick up a bar of soap—as in a cliché, or the punch li
ne to an unfortunate joke. (Or, as it happens, the crux of a classic Robert Klein bit, in which the comedian and lifelong baseball fan talked about “the great trauma and privilege of seeing Yogi Berra naked.”) Poor Jordan couldn’t turn his head in time to avoid the crack of Yogi Berra’s ass—oh, man … he got a real eyeful.

  It’s an image that continues to terrify Jordan, all these years later—and after hearing his description, I was never again able to sit and chat with Yogi without cracking a smile.

  * * *

  One of the great side benefits to my role as a broadcaster is the chance it offers to meet some of the visiting dignitaries of the game. When you’re working in a major market like New York, that can sometimes mean you’re visited by big stars from beyond the world of baseball—Broadway performers, local politicians, celebrities with movies or products or causes to promote.

  That’s what happened one night in the SNY booth when we were visited by Michael Milken, the junk bond financier who’d famously pled guilty to securities violations back during my playing days. After serving his time, Milken turned his attention to philanthropy, and for a number of years he’d partnered with Major League Baseball to promote prostate cancer awareness. Milken’s interest came from a personal place: he’d been diagnosed soon after his release, and was now in remission, and he spent a good chunk of each baseball season visiting ballparks around the country and talking about prostate health, sometimes teaming up with baseball veterans with their own connections to this type of cancer.

  It was a good cause, and we were always happy to shine a light on Milken’s effort—but I never liked the guy. I applauded what he was doing in this area, and his other good works, but I hated what he stood for back in the 1980s and could never look past his transgressions. Still, I never wanted to get in the way of one of these public service appeals, so each year when he’d come by the booth to talk about the amount of money his foundation was donating to cancer research with every big league home run hit, or whatever the tie-in was that year, I’d step out to get a cup of coffee or stretch my legs. I didn’t make a big deal of it, just quietly slipped away and let him do his thing.