by John Smoltz
Now, don’t get me wrong here; it’s not like I am up there giving anybody a pass. I call things like I see them. But I think guys like me, guys who have played before, tend naturally to have a better perspective when it comes to analyzing the game. When it comes to making sense of a perennial postseason team getting swept in their first playoff series, a hitter who can’t seem to make contact to save his life, or a pitcher who has temporarily lost the area code for the strike zone, it helps to have been there and done that. Guys like me know what Yogi Berra was talking about when he said, “Baseball is ninety percent mental; the other half is physical.” Sometimes, despite what the scoreboard says, you’re not watching a better team beat a worse team. You’re actually watching a superior team beat itself.
Unfortunately, my trials with the media would remain a constant theme throughout my career and, as it turns out, even today. I don’t know why, but I always seem to attract false stories like some guys collect stray socks in the bottom of their locker.
While I have clearly fallen victim to an inaccurate or misleading story on occasion, I think it’s safe to say that there isn’t anything “out there” that would make somebody seriously question my character. I’ve never been linked to any scandals. There’s no hint of steroids. There are no legitimate claims of cheating. And that’s really what I am most proud of. I played baseball through several dodgy eras—the juiced bat, the juiced ball, the juiced strike zone, and the juiced body—but not once was I ever even tempted to mortgage everything I believed in for the chance to be more successful.
Steroids are a topic I think we’re all tired of hearing about, frankly, but it’s important to me to note that when it comes to performance-enhancing drugs and my career, I never saw anyone using them, I never heard anyone talk about using them, and I was never asked to use them myself. I don’t know anything beyond the rumors and speculation we’ve all heard.
With that said, there are a few things about steroids I will readily admit. For starters, I never would have imagined the scope of the problem or that we’d still be dealing with steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs today in some form or fashion. Never when I was playing did I realize how prevalent steroid use really was, and beyond that, I was completely shocked to learn how many pitchers supposedly used them. I had no clue steroids would help pitchers to the degree that they have apparently helped some guys.
The one thing I have stood firmly for from the beginning is anything that will help eradicate steroid use from the game and restore competitive balance. Whether or not I feel it was the government’s place to get involved and hold congressional hearings—which incidentally still ranks up there as one of the saddest things I’ve ever watched on TV—I certainly understand and share the collective angst to get steroids out of the sport, especially since they started trickling down to kids.
The steroid era has undeniably changed the game and I hate that fans have been given legitimate reasons to wonder and second-guess players who are putting up obscene stats or making seemingly miraculous jumps in body composition in short amounts of time. I hate it for the fans, but I especially hate it for the players who are out there injecting nothing more than their own motivation into improving their game or making their bodies stronger in the offseason.
If you ask me, one of the greatest tragedies in sports today is to be falsely accused of using any performance-enhancing drug, because once a player is tagged—correctly or incorrectly—there’s really no redemption. A cloud of suspicion will haunt him his entire career, regardless of whether the suspicion is based on rumors and speculation or evidence and/or an admission. The reality is that an accused player is considered guilty until proven innocent. It’s not fair, but it’s the reality. And I’m sure glad I don’t have to worry about it.
As you might have realized by now, this is not your typical autobiography. We’re not starting in the beginning with “I was born in Warren, Michigan.” We’re focusing on my last year in the major leagues, 2009. For those of you who have followed my career, you know already that this was not my best year. I was trying to come back from major shoulder surgery at age forty-one, and my team, the beloved Braves, whom I so dearly wanted to end my career with, basically viewed me as the old trusted workhorse who was no longer useful to anyone. Nobody within the organization wanted to take me out behind the barn and put me down, but nobody wanted to sign me either. So I began anew with the Boston Red Sox, and that, my friends, is a story I’d much prefer to bury in the back of my mind and try to forget than to dig up and dissect in a book.
But as much as this is an autobiography, it isn’t about me. (If it were all about me, I’d write a book about 1996, when I went 24–8 and won the Cy Young, only maybe I’d change the ending so we actually won the World Series that year.) This book is about the journey that God has put me on, the challenges I have faced, and the challenges I have overcome. I hope that by using my final year as a backdrop, I can teach somebody somewhere something. Whether it’s a philosophy, a lifestyle, or things that I’ll never know, that is my honest intention.
I like to ask people, “What’s the most days in a row you’ve been happy?” I usually get this look like, “Not many.” When they think about it, there aren’t a whole lot of days they come up with because the reality of our lives today is that there all these things that can interrupt our happiness. But for me, those things, they’re peripheral. Joy is central. You can have joy in the midst of some of the worst suffering.
I know because I’ve been there myself.
Chapter Three
SO YOU SAY I’VE GOT A CHANCE?!
“Wow, I don’t feel that bad.”
That was my first thought as I opened my eyes and started to come to after undergoing arthroscopic shoulder surgery on June 10, 2008. I had literally just started to wake up and take note of my surroundings, and almost on cue, a nurse came in the room.
Her eyes scanned the room as she approached the bed, visually inspecting my IV and the various monitors I was hooked up to, then she sort of mechanically grabbed my arm to read my bracelet as she said, “Name please.”
I looked at her, at this busy lady who obviously meant business, and said slyly, “Bond. James Bond.”
The nurse was not, in any way, amused. Beyond an almost inaudible sigh, she did not react at all. She just repeated her question, more emphatically this time, like she was speaking to a misbehaving adolescent boy: “Name please.”
Meanwhile, my brother Mike, out of respect to the nurse, was trying like heck to bottle up his reaction. There we were, snickering like two schoolkids literally moments after I had just come out of anesthesia from a surgery that could very well mean the end of my baseball career. It was such a unique thing in so many ways because I never woke up in a good mood. This was the fifth surgery of my career, and in the past I had notoriously woken up in an awful state: sick to my stomach more often than not and just feeling downright miserable. I took my mood now as my first good omen in the long and winding journey that I hoped would lead me back to the mound.
Dr. Joe Chandler, the Atlanta Braves team physician and an orthopedic surgeon, came in next. He had traveled all the way down to Birmingham, Alabama, to collaborate with and assist Dr. James Andrews, the orthopedic surgeon who performed the operation. At this point in my career, Dr. Chandler was much more than my doctor, with all the injuries we had been through together since we both joined the Braves in 1987. Our relationship had grown beyond baseball and we had come to share in each other’s joys and walk together through the struggles of daily life. He was in many ways more like a second father than just my doctor. I knew the man and he knew me. And he knew what I wanted to know before I asked the question.
“Well, what do you think?” I said as soon as he entered the room.
Dr. Chandler walked over to the bed and started hemming and hawing. I mean, he was talking, but not really saying anything. It was a whole lot of “Well… You know… I mean…”
I’m like, “Come
on, just hit me with it. Give it to me straight, do I have a chance?”
And I’ll never forget this: He said, very cautiously, as if the measured pace of the words would help me grasp the true reality of the situation, “We think with the way you work out, and the way you rehab, we think you’ve got a chance.”
In all reality, that probably meant “you don’t have a chance.” But he went on to explain to me that when they opened up my shoulder, my labrum—which basically works like a rubber gasket, surrounding your socket and keeping your shoulder in place—looked like hamburger meat. They knew it was going to be bad, but it was far worse than even they had expected. It took nine anchors to basically tack my labrum back into place, the most Dr. Andrews remembered using, with the exception of a surgery he had performed on NFL quarterback Drew Brees. I listened to everything he had to say, but I had already heard all I needed to hear. “So you’re telling me I’ve got a chance!” I’m telling you, it was a scene straight out of Dumb and Dumber.
From that point on, my motivation was simple: Every day I got up with the sole mission to get back and be able to be pitch again. I wanted nothing more than to pitch for the Atlanta Braves again in 2009, but I knew there’d be some tough decisions and I didn’t know for sure if it was going to work out. I couldn’t control whether or not the Braves wanted to sign me. I hoped things would work out, but in the end it wasn’t just about trying to make it back to pitch for the Braves. It was about trying to make it back to pitch, period. I was chasing the same dream that had first caught fire in my heart at age seven. Here I was at age forty-one, and nothing, not even the threat of the Braves not wanting to sign me again, was going to be enough to extinguish that dream.
But in order to understand this, we’ve got to go to back to the beginning for a moment.
If somebody had told my parents in 1974 that their oldest child was going to be a major league pitcher, they wouldn’t have believed it. And not only would they not have believed it; I’m not so sure they would have been happy about it. You see, I was born John Andrew Smoltz, a descendant of Italian immigrants, and my destiny was to be a professional accordion player.
Music wasn’t just a hobby in my family. My mom’s uncle owned a music shop and my mom and dad both gave accordion lessons there. My dad, John Adam Smoltz, was an electronics salesman in his day job, while my mom, Mary, stayed home with me; my little brother, Mike; and little sister, Bernadette. My dad played in a band and a lot of our weekend activities, especially in those early years, revolved around the accordion. If you were having a polka or an Oktoberfest in Warren, Michigan, and you needed an accordion player, you called the Smoltzes.
By age four, I was already being indoctrinated in the Smoltz family way. I took accordion lessons and I practiced every day. I worked hard at it, but I seemed to have the gift of a musical ear and, to a certain extent, it seemed to come naturally to me. Soon my parents were driving me all over the place to compete in contests and play recitals. As my parents tell me today, I would usually win, even against kids almost twice my age, and my parents could not have been more proud. Here I was, their first child, already the anointed leader of the next generation of proud accordionists. All was right in the world until I turned seven.
At age seven, I had one of those moments where I just suddenly knew what I wanted to do, and on the flip side, what I didn’t want to do anymore. A dream was born that day. A dream that would initially disappoint my parents, but would fulfill my life in the long run.
As the story goes, we had pulled into a gas station to fill up our little AMC Pacer. As my mom stood there pumping gas, she struck up a conversation with me in the backseat.
She said, “Johnny,” which is what my parents still call me to this day, “what are you going to do when you grow up?”
As she remembers it, I sat there, sort of considering the question thoughtfully, and then said, “Mom, I want to be a pro baseball player.”
My mom would tell you today that she never seriously thought I would ever make the big leagues. Sports were not anything anyone in her family had ever done, but beyond that, while she may not have known much about sports, she knew enough to know it was a long shot at best. Thankfully she was kind of enough to always keep that opinion to herself.
But still, she looked at me and said, “Well, Johnny, that’s a great dream, but you know, a lot of little boys want to play pro baseball, but not a lot of them ever get to do it. Maybe it would be a good idea if you had a backup plan, you know, if baseball didn’t work out.”
That seemed reasonable to me, so I thought about it for a second and then I said, “Okay, well, if I can’t play baseball, maybe I could be a gas-station attendant.”
To which my mom said, “Well, let’s not tell your father that.”
I obviously grew out of wanting to be a gas-station attendant one day, but it’s safe to say really from that day forward my dream of playing pro ball became like an eternal flame in my heart. It would continue to stay lit through every obstacle I ever faced, from the light rain of a blown save to the torrential downpour of a multiple-game losing streak. All it knew how to do was burn.
Age seven would prove to be a turning point in my life. It was the time when I put down the accordion and picked up a baseball, and nothing has been the same for my family ever since.
I don’t know if I can adequately explain how big a deal it was for my parents to let me quit the accordion. This was like the oldest son shunning the family business, and not because he wasn’t capable, but because he wasn’t interested. It was clear I had inherited the same musical gene that my parents were blessed with, and to my family it was a tough pill to swallow. My mom says to this day that she really thought her uncle was going to disown her and our entire family for allowing me to quit.
My parents, while disappointed with my decision, were, thankfully, rational about it. They knew my heart wasn’t into the accordion, that I wasn’t having fun playing the instrument. I cannot thank my parents enough for the opportunity they gave me to pursue and experience baseball. Their openness, their willingness to allow me to try something that was sort of from left field for our family—it was such a blessing to me.
From that day forward, I had one vision for my life. All the things I had learned by playing the accordion I translated into baseball. But the difference was I not only had a talent for baseball, I also had a passion for baseball. Nobody had to push me to go out and practice. For some reason, even at seven, it was almost ingrained in me that this is what I was supposed to do. I had such a visionary, dream-type mind-set; I never stopped to consider all the reasons why I might not make it. I just always believed I was going to make it and I always practiced like I would.
When I got a little older, I basically laid claim to the brick wall right outside our screen door on the front of our home in Lansing, where we moved when I was in the fifth grade. I’d mark the outline of the strike zone on the wall with tape and then I would literally stand at the curb, because that was as far back as I could go without being in the street, and I would pitch against that brick wall with a rubber ball for hours and hours. Every once in a while I would throw a wild pitch, missing the wall entirely, and the ball would ricochet off our aluminum screen door, which drove my mom nuts. Whenever she heard that telltale clank, she would yell something like “Johnny, you better learn to throw strikes!”
I taught myself everything. I didn’t go to camps. I’d watch TV, look at a book, see a grip, and go outside and try to emulate it. It was the only way I had ever known to achieve (witness the accordion playing) and I just worked and worked. It was just second nature to me to go out there and pitch every day.
One of my favorite things to do was to watch a game on TV and then go out and pitch it. I really didn’t waste my time with regular-season games, though; I went right to the postseason. In my mind, it was always the seventh game of the World Series and I was pitching for the Detroit Tigers. I imagined myself pitching every big game known to man.
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br /> I put the pressure on myself so much, so often, that I think I prepared myself for moments like when I went out to pitch Game Seven of the 1991 World Series against the Minnesota Twins. It was like living out my wildest dream—a dream I had been envisioning since I was seven years old—and everything I had ever imagined, down to being matched up against the very guy I had spent my childhood idolizing, longtime Detroit Tiger Jack Morris, who was now pitching for the Twins.
I can still, to this day, remember standing on the side of the mound in the bullpen during warm-ups, being struck by this sense of déjà vu. I’m standing there getting ready to pitch and I’m almost confused by the mix of emotions I’m experiencing. It was part nerves and part “man, I have done this so many times.” What finally clicked things into perspective for me was watching this little girl—she couldn’t have been more than seven years old—sing the National Anthem right before the game.
I remember Leo Mazzone, the Braves’ pitching coach, looking at me and the expression on my face and asking, “Are you nervous?”
And I was like, “Not anymore.”
He goes, “Why?”
And I said, “If that little girl can sing the National Anthem and she’s seven years old, then I can pitch the seventh game of the World Series.”
Once the game started, I felt like I was right back at the brick wall, living out my dream. It really was like the entire game was meant to be—except for the final score.
We lost the game, and the World Series, but I had never felt more comfortable in a situation I was not prepared for. I had no experience in any postseason before, but there I was drawing on this huge vat of confidence that I had unknowingly gained through all those years throwing simulated Game Sevens against the brick wall. And I’m not lying when I tell you that year after year, it was always the same way. The postseason always felt like the place where I was supposed to be. And I wanted the opportunity to be in that spot every single time. In some way, it became an obsession for me in my career to find ways to get there again.