by Ron Darling
And yet … and yet … there it was.
Turned out, I had a helluva game after this close encounter with my father. I threw seven shutout innings, to help put the Mets in position to win the game 6–2 and to even the series at two games apiece, and forever after it felt to me like the moment had been heaven-sent by the baseball gods.
Cal’s story started way before he put on a big league uniform. He’d grown up in the Orioles organization, where his father, Cal Ripken Sr., had been a longtime coach. When Baltimore drafted him with the twenty-fourth pick of the 1978 draft, both Cals were elated. Cal Jr. finally made it to the Opening Day roster in 1982. His father was in the third base coaching box. And what did Cal Jr. do? First time up, one out, Ken Singleton on second, he smacked his first major league home run, and collected what has got to be one of the finest, sweetest attaboys in the history of the game as he rounded third.
Another blessing from the baseball gods, I’m betting.
10
The Only Living Boy in New York
One of the great offshoots to a Manhattan-centric baseball career is the way it introduces you to an aspect of the city and its denizens you might not normally get to experience—and, relatedly, the way the city itself seems to look back at you in kind.
You’ll see I’ve pinched a lyric from an old Simon & Garfunkel song to stand as the title to this chapter, because during my formative years in the city I really did feel like a kid in a candy store. There were times in there when I couldn’t believe my good fortune, to be a professional baseball player living in the greatest city in the world, and it felt to me like I was walking the streets in a kind of movie montage, with Artie Garfunkel singing the soundtrack:
Hey, I’ve got nothing to do today but smile.
Indeed, the points of connection that found me away from Shea Stadium were very often as formative as the relationships that were built on the game itself …
For example, I was fortunate at the front end of my time in a uniform to throw in with Anthony J. Ferrara, one of the great characters of the game. Tony had been a successful model and a struggling actor before he somehow wangled a gig as the Mets’ batting practice pitcher. He also threw BP for the Yankees, so he took the mound pretty much every day during baseball season.
Tony was a character of the first rank. He had a closetful of Oleg Cassini suits—he used to model them back in the 1960s and ’70s, and the suits still fit him perfectly. In a lot of ways, he was my spirit guide to city life when I first joined the team. He knew all the best spots for sushi, steaks, drinks, after-hours merrymaking, and he seemed to know everybody in town. In fact, I don’t think I ever met a bouncer or maître d’ in Tony’s presence who didn’t greet him by name—even when they were disinclined to wave him (us!) past their velvet rope.
The thing about Tony was he wasn’t much of a batting practice pitcher. How he got these two premier gigs was never made clear. He used to pitch for the University of Miami, had always dreamed of making it to the bigs, and I guess this was as far as he got. It wasn’t everything, but it was something, were it not for the fact that everyone on our team used to grouse that he was probably one of the worst batting practice pitchers of all time. I can’t say for sure how he was regarded up in the Bronx, but some of my Mets teammates wanted to run him out of town.
See, when you’re throwing BP, the key is to keep the ball true and straight. Tony’s ball moved all over the place. And then it moved some more. There was some sink to it, and his control wasn’t the best. I remember how pissed Keith Hernandez would be after a session with Tony, because Tony would make him work for his cuts. And yet somehow Tony managed to hold on to these two jobs for over ten years. For dear life, he held on to them. In fact, Tony was so pleased with his unique status as the batting practice pitcher for New York’s two professional baseball teams, he used to keep a running count of the total number of pitches he threw in his sessions. The reasons for this were also never made clear, and yet each day he’d update the number in this little notebook he used to carry. No one was more impressed with the total than Tony himself. Surely, he had one of the great rubber arms in the game, because each round of BP ran to well over two hundred pitches, and when you’re throwing on back-to-back days, all season long without let up, that can lead to some serious wear and tear.
We called Tony “The Coach,” because that’s what he aspired to be, but in reality he wasn’t cut out to coach players at the major league level. Later on, Tony found success (and fulfillment) coaching youth baseball, and there the moniker applied, but with us he was more like the guy we loved to razz about his ineffectiveness as a batting practice pitcher. Still, he became a kind of mentor to me—a little like Clarence in that great Frank Capra movie It’s a Wonderful Life, which I guess cast me as Jimmy Stewart. Tony would show me the ropes in and around town. He used to love to take me down to Little Italy, to this neighborhood bakery he knew, where he taught me about the cookies I was supposed to eat with my double espresso. (Little known fact: every time someone pours a shot of Sambuca into a cup of espresso an angel gets its wings!) He taught me the difference between Sicilian cuisine and Northern Italian cuisine, and showed me where to find the best slice of pizza in the city.
It was Tony who introduced me to Jerry Casale’s place, Pino’s, where I ended up taking most of my meals during my first couple years in the bigs.
Tony had the city wired, and knew how to work every angle. His angling didn’t always achieve the desired result, but he worked those angles just the same. He was constantly running around our clubhouse with a ball or a bat or some other piece of memorabilia he needed signed for this or that charity auction, although we always suspected that this or that charity was Tony himself. After you live in New York for a while, you collect an assortment of friends and gadabouts who don’t seem to have a discernible source of income. Tony was that kind of guy—he could have written a book on how to live in Manhattan on $5 a day … and then sell you a copy for $10.
Once, he came to our house for Christmas dinner, about a year or two after my oldest son, Tyler, was born. Tony wasn’t the type to show up for Christmas dinner empty-handed, and sure enough he’d brought something along for Tyler: a giveaway day helmet from a Yankee Stadium promotion. The fact that the helmet was a freebie didn’t bother me or surprise me—that was Tony’s way—but it was an adult helmet.
(Hey, it’s the thought that counts, and Tony had clearly put some thought into this one—not a lot, but some.)
He used to drive a tiny Honda Accord, which for reasons having nothing to do with his association with the Mets was painted orange. We called the car the Orange Crush, for reasons having less to do with the soda brand than with the surprising lack of leg room it offered a professional athlete. For years, Tony drove me to the stadium—only, finding the car on game day could be an adventure, especially following a particularly rough night on the town, when the car could have been left anywhere. Back in the prehistoric 1980s, there was no way to stay in constant touch with another person. Without cell phones, we couldn’t snap a pic to remind our drunk-ass selves where we might have parked the car the night before. We couldn’t text each other, as we split up and circled the neighborhood, looking for clues. I could only sit by the phone in my apartment and wait for Tony’s call.
And when the call from Tony finally came in, it followed the usual patterns …
Me: “What time we headed out?”
Coach: “Three o’clock.”
Me: “Where’s the Crush?”
Coach: “I’ll have to get back to you.”
You’d think an orange vehicle would stand out as we walked up and down the block looking for the car, but the Crush was so small you couldn’t just peer around the corner and survey the street because it was always tucked into the tiniest spot, between a couple moving vans or delivery trucks.
That apartment, by the way, factored into my emerging sense of quintessential New York–iness as well. During my second year in th
e bigs, I lived with fellow pitcher Tim Leary, who was one of my closest friends on the team until he was traded to the Brewers before the start of the 1985 season. We lived in a two-bedroom unit on the corner of 33rd Street and Third Avenue, and we used to love telling people our address for the way it gave us a chance to slip into our mock New York City accents and say we were at “Toity-toid and Toid.”
Tony knew the manager, Rudy Riska, at the Downtown Athletic Club, a private social club and gym in the financial district that I’d only heard of because they awarded the Heisman Trophy every year—one of those New York institutions I never would have discovered on my own were it not for Tony. Rudy would let us work out there. We had the run of the place—one of the great perks of knowing Tony, although I suppose it didn’t hurt that I pitched for the Mets. Tony was in tremendous shape. At the time, I assumed we were about the same age, but it turned out he had more than twenty years on me. We’d lift weights, use the sauna, play hoops. For a while, we were in a regular game with Kevin Dillon and Matt Dillon, around the time Matt’s acting career was starting to pop with The Outsiders and The Flamingo Kid. (Kevin’s career wouldn’t really take off until Entourage in 2004, although he worked pretty steadily in smaller roles throughout my time with the Mets.) They weren’t the tallest guys on the court, but the Dillon brothers had game. They were tenacious. We ran full-court, and we ran hard. There was a standing game at noon for all the Wall Street guys, and the caliber of ball was competitive, but they were always out the door by 12:58. If you wanted to keep playing, there was another full-court game that started up around three o’clock. Tony didn’t usually stay for the later game, but we mixed it up pretty good with the “Masters of the Universe” and the Dillon brothers.
Tony’s New York wasn’t exactly “A-list” New York, but at least he was on the list. If going to the Oak Bar at the Plaza was the absolute coolest, classiest thing you could do in New York after-hours, Tony would find the fourth or fifth absolute coolest, classiest thing for us to do instead.
When I was doing the town with Tony, we never quite made it to the big table at Elaine’s, the famed bar and nightclub on the Upper East Side run by the legendary restaurateur Elaine Kaufman and frequented by heavy hitters like Woody Allen, Gay Talese, Norman Mailer, and Jackie O. Even on my own, or in the company of my fellow Mets, I rarely had the gravitas to be seated front and center, but Elaine always greeted me warmly, generously. She wasn’t so kind or welcoming to everybody, so I counted it a blessing when she would get up from her seat and cross the restaurant to give me a hug. Elaine was a big woman, as her favored patrons will surely recall, and I don’t offer up that observation to be impolite but to highlight how grateful I always was when she made the effort to stand and greet me—no easy thing for her, I’m afraid.
In those days, a hug from Elaine was a sign that you had arrived … although as we passed that big table in front with all those luminaries, and then all those lesser and lesser tables as you moved toward the back, with those lesser and lesser luminaries, I was reminded of how far I still had to go. Once, she sat me down at the big table next to the actor Chris Noth, well before he had his first real star turns in Law & Order and Sex and the City. This was back when he was still in a soap opera and had just joined the cast of Hill Street Blues. Still, I thought it was a sign of where I was in this particular pecking order of New York City nightlife celebrity. Yes, I was at the big table at Elaine’s, but so was Chris Noth, so it could only mean that it was a slow night on the town. A couple nights later, when the restaurant was a little busier, Elaine escorted me right past the big table, and then right past the next table, until she found a seat for me at a third-tier table … once again, right next to Chris Noth, so years later I could flash back on that night and content myself with the thought that even though my star had apparently fallen it had done so in lockstep with a genuine heartthrob.
Mondays in the city would typically find us at “oldies” night at Heartbreak, a disco on Varick Street. The night would usually start with a late dinner at Marylou’s, an Italian joint on West Ninth Street that was a popular hangout for artists, athletes, and celebrities. We used to go there to see all the models who’d hang around and pretend to eat Marylou’s famous chicken.
Another favorite hang was the China Club, where Chazz Palminteri used to work as a bouncer. We got to know each other, over time, and on some nights we’d find ourselves on the street outside the club just shooting the shit. Someone would ask Chazz what he had going on away from the club, and he’d say, “Oh, I’m workin’ on somethin’. I’m workin’ on a story.”
Chazz would tell everyone in those days that he wasn’t planning on being a bouncer forever, said he was going make it as a writer. We would look at him and laugh and say, “Yeah, right.” To us, Chazz was just another colorful character on the New York scene, but then, a couple years later, his one-man show A Bronx Tale opened off-Broadway and was later adapted into a movie with Robert DeNiro—so, yeah, I guess he was working on something.
One of the trademark features of the China Club was this giant aquarium they had over the bar. Every night, a couple drinks in, I’d get to thinking that at some point, sooner or later, somebody would have one too many or say the wrong thing to the wrong person at just the wrong time and a glass or a bottle would get tossed straight through those aquarium walls.
Never happened, but there was always the chance that it could, which kept things interesting.
There was a pecking order at the China Club, too. The place was dominated by a giant bar, with two mezzanine seating areas and a huge dance floor. You’d be seated or situated depending on who you were or where you were in your career. If you were somebody, you sat on the right part of the mezzanine. If you were not quite somebody, and yet a notch or two up from being a nobody, you sat on the left side of the mezzanine. If you were merely a wannabe and in reality nobody at all, you were relegated to the dance floor. Most nights, we’d take our place on the right, but we would be seated on the left from time to time when our visit might have overlapped with a group of someones a little more worthy of this particular sliver of limelight.
(Oh, and speaking of Limelight … that was another New York hot spot during my early years with the Mets—a converted church in Chelsea that was turned into a nightclub that on some nights was as wild as wild could be.)
Tony’s Orange Crush was my standard ride to Shea Stadium in those days, but he almost never drove me home. He’d typically leave after the third inning or so, and we’d catch up with him after the game. There were just a few of us on the team living in Manhattan during my first couple years with the Mets, so we’d roll together back to the city. After most games, that meant hopping into the delivery van Rusty Staub would repurpose from his Upper East Side restaurant. We used to call it the Emerson Fittipaldi Brazilian Rib Machine. As I wrote earlier, Rusty was good to his word when he promised Frank Cashen that he’d look after me, and ferry me back to the city after our home games—only he never said anything about ferrying me around in style. Rusty’s ride was a beaten-down, graffiti-strewn commercial van that looked like something Shaggy would drive to a haunted house on Scooby-Doo. It was used all day by Rusty’s crew to haul slabs of beef and pork, and someone would drop it off at Shea so he could drive himself home after the game. (There was no refrigeration unit in the van, as I recall, so on hot summer days it could get pretty rank in there!) There was a bucket seat for a passenger up front, but the rear of the van had been stripped bare to accommodate Rusty’s daily deliveries, so we sat on the metal runners in the cargo area, or on milk crates. Rusty would drive, and Keith Hernandez would ride shotgun, and I’d pile into the back of the van with Tim Leary, Danny Heep, and Ed Lynch—our Manhattan contingent.
Rusty was famous among our group for being incredibly cheap—and deathly afraid of heights. What this meant as far as our reverse commute was concerned was that we’d never take the Triborough Bridge or the Midtown Tunnel back into the city because he didn’t w
ant to pay the tolls, so we’d head for the 59th Street Bridge. Trouble was, on some nights the traffic would be rerouted in such a way that we’d have to take the outside lane. That always freaked Rusty out, to be driving at the very edge of the bridge, so perilously close to the water. He couldn’t take it, so whenever that happened he’d stop the car, stop traffic, and hop out of the driver’s seat. He wouldn’t even say anything. He’d just throw the car into park, get out, and walk around to the passenger seat, and it was up to one of us to take the wheel. Keith would never drive, so it fell to me or Danny or Eddie.
Most nights, we’d head directly to Rusty’s restaurant on 73rd and Third. We’d get a bite to eat and throw back a couple beers before heading home, and after a while word got around that Rusty and a few of his teammates were in the habit of eating and drinking there after games. Very quickly, Rusty’s place became one of the go-to bars in the city, just on the back of our postgame routine. The restaurant was always busy, during lunch and dinner hours, but the fact that you could swing by late at night and maybe join a few of your Metsies for a drink kicked things up a notch—changed the whole vibe, really.
* * *
And so began my foray into the life of the city. Very quickly, I started thinking of myself as a New Yorker—no small leap, considering my New England roots, especially when it came to the local sports scene.
Following my first full season with the Mets, I treated myself to season tickets to the Knicks and Rangers. I couldn’t really afford it, but I wanted to support my fellow New York athletes and sit with the fans when it wasn’t my ass on the line, so Madison Square Garden was like my second home that winter. The Knicks weren’t very good in those days, but they had the great Bernard King, before he blew out his knee and had to miss a couple seasons. The Rangers weren’t very good, either, although they seemed to always make the playoffs.