by John Smoltz
As I look back now, it’s easy for me to see that I did an incredibly poor job at managing my own mind-set in Boston. I knew the rich history of my new team and what a gamble they had taken on me, and from the very beginning I started carrying around my old backpack of junk again. It’s natural to want to do as well as you can, but in my case, this desire ended up hurting me. I got anxious. I wanted to do so well, so bad, and so fast, that I lost patience and started obsessing over the outcomes instead of having faith in the process. The Boston Red Sox actually had more patience with me than I had with myself.
In total, I made eight starts with the Red Sox, from June 25 through August 6, the date of my last appearance, and the numbers themselves tell the uneven and largely underwhelming story: I was 2–5 with an 8.32 ERA. I pitched forty innings, averaging only five innings per start. I had recorded thirty-three strikeouts, but also allowed fifty-nine hits and eight home runs. In the month of July alone, I allowed twenty-three earned runs.
No matter how I justify it or how well I pitched at times, things just didn’t go well. I was bound and determined to make it work and make it happen on the mound, but this desire never materialized into success. The irony is that in twenty and two-thirds innings as a visitor at Fenway, I hadn’t given up a single earned run. But as a home-team player, well … it’s safe to say, in that market, I just didn’t deliver.
Never would I have imagined it being the way it was, or ending the way it did, in Boston.
On August 6, on the road at Yankee Stadium, in what would prove to be my last start in a Red Sox uniform, I was absolutely shelled by the Yankees, giving up nine hits and eight earned runs in just over three innings. I went back to the hotel after the game and I’ll never forget telling Kathryn, “I think that’s it. I don’t know what decision they are going to make, but just based on gut feeling, I think that’s it.” And a few hours later, I found out that it was: The Boston Red Sox were designating me for assignment, which for all intents and purposes meant I was being released; I had promptly arrived at the absolute lowest point of my professional career.
Even though I had sensed the impending doom, it certainly did not in any way soften the blow of hearing the news that I was being released from Boston. I was crushed. I was humiliated. And I was incredibly disappointed in myself. I had just been knocked down harder and farther than ever before, but in a lot of ways I felt like I had been down this road before.
Getting released in Boston felt eerily similar to the time when I failed miserably in my first real debut in the national arena of competitive amateur baseball in a little place called Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Remembering Johnstown helped remind me of a simple fact, one that always seemed to be painful but had always been true about me: The more I fail, the more I learn.
Johnstown, Pennsylvania, is home to the All-American Amateur Baseball Association national tournament, largely considered to be one of the best amateur baseball tournaments in the country. Each August it’s a veritable showcase of some of the best age twenty and under talent in the country, all on display for scouts of major league clubs. My summer baseball team from Lansing had an every-other-year, automatic bid into the tournament back then, and I went to Johnstown for the first time when I was sixteen years old.
I was three to four years younger than most of the other kids at the tournament, but that was pretty status quo for me. I had been playing up, or playing with older kids, my entire life, and I was used not only to holding my own, but to being one of the standouts. But that was in Michigan. Johnstown was about to be an eye-opening experience for me.
Johnstown gave me my first taste of baseball on a national scale. It was the first time I had seen scouts, it was the first time I had seen radar guns, and it was the first time I was about to figure out that I wasn’t as good as I thought I was.
To this day, I can remember pitching in a game against a team from Brooklyn, New York. The first three innings were promising; it was three up, three down, three times in a row. I remember sitting in the dugout waiting for the fourth inning thinking, Wow!
But then came the fourth inning, which would turn out to be the single worst inning of my entire baseball career. I’m not so sure if there’s ever been a pitcher who’s had an inning this bad. I can remember it like it was yesterday: I gave up a single, a home run, a walk, a home run, a double, a home run, another double, and a home run. I gave up four two-run homers in one inning.
As the inning wore on and the runners kept circling the bases in pairs, the Brooklyn team, which was largely Hispanic, had transformed into full-on rally mode. They were going crazy in the dugout, jumping up and down and beating on all these upturned pails they normally used for hauling around their equipment.
As the home runs continued to fly out of the park, they broke into this chant and they just kept repeating some phrase over and over again in Spanish. I could only imagine what they were saying, but it was safe to assume from all the finger-pointing that it had a little something to do with me.
My coach at the time, Javier Cavazos, who was very fluent in Spanish, came out to the mound after I had just given up the fourth home run of the inning, obviously to take me out of the game. When he arrived at the mound, Coach Cavazos didn’t say anything about my pitching.
He just looked at me and said, “Do you want to know what they’ve been yelling?”
I said, “Yeah, why not.”
He said, “‘¡Dale a ese tipo su Icy Hot!’—which means ‘Get that guy some Icy Hot!’”
After watching me jerk my neck back time and time again to see if the ball was going to stay in the park, the Brooklyn players were obviously concerned that I might be sore the next day. It was nice to know they cared.
To use a boxing analogy, that Johnstown tournament was like taking a sucker punch to the face. I had momentarily dropped my guard, I wasn’t prepared, and my opponent had made me pay. The whole experience definitely left me reeling for a moment, but by the time we were packed up and headed back home, I was already planning how I would bounce back off the mat.
I didn’t need anyone to tell me what I needed to do. My dad didn’t have to push me; he really didn’t even have to say a word. As far as I was concerned, it was my dream and it was on me.
I remember just telling my dad on the drive back home to Michigan in our old RV, “I’m not as good as I think I am. I need to be better and I need to be pushed a little bit.”
I came back from Johnstown a little bloodied but more determined than ever. I had always worked hard, but now I rededicated myself to working harder than I ever had before. In retrospect, it was this tournament that inspired me to take my game to the next level.
It wasn’t like I was cocky before Johnstown; I don’t think I’ve ever been cocky really, I’m just naturally not that way. It was more like, before Johnstown, I didn’t realize how far I had to go. Here I had been in my Michigan bubble, not fully realizing that there were other kids out there who were just as talented as I was, if not more talented, and working just as hard, too.
After playing professional baseball for so long, I can’t tell you how thankful I am for experiences like Johnstown. I can’t quote you any statistics because there’s really no way to track something like this, but I’m convinced that it’s true. I think the majority of the players who make the pros are so naturally talented that they have been dominating other people their entire lives and they’ve never experienced real failure. They get to the big leagues and they are in for a rude awakening. They get in a slump or are challenged in a way they’ve never been challenged before, and a lot of them don’t know how to handle it.
That was simply never the case for me, and in a lot of ways it defined me as a pitcher. In many ways, I was used to being an underdog and I never played like any lead was safe. I didn’t mind rallying and I didn’t mind working my way back out of a tough spell. The bigger the odds, the more unlikely the outcome, the better, as far as I was concerned. When things got really tough and the moment got
bigger and the pressure kept mounting, it just seemed to lock me in.
When I go back to those Johnstown days and consider what has happened in my career, it all seems to make sense, like pieces of a puzzle. Whenever I felt my life was going really fast as a major league baseball player, I always remained grounded to my roots and I made myself remember what got me to that point. I never forgot what I went through or how I went through it. At age forty-two or age sixteen, it was all the same. Sure, I had just gotten my teeth kicked in, but now it was time to rally.
When I look back on my time in Boston, what I see is a string of missed opportunities. The Boston Red Sox took such a big risk on me and I gave them every effort I possibly could, but when the moments where I was used to being really good arrived, I wasn’t good. On top of basically learning a new arm and a new slot, mentally I had lost something. I couldn’t go to that next level where I had always been able to go in order to override the pressure. I had been playing baseball and facing mental adversity on the mound for more than thirty years by this point, and somehow, amid everything, I had lost my edge.
And once things started going downhill, there was going to be a really short window of time in which I could control my fate and have a chance at redemption. It’s just the nature of the job. When you’re with an organization for a long time, you have a longer leash, if you will. There’s generally more time granted to recover from a bad start or a slump. When you’re the new guy, you just don’t have the luxury of a lot of time to fix anything. There’s no history, no statistics to show you’re worth the money you are being paid. The discussion in the front office quickly dissolves into something like “Man, I thought he was going to be better, I can’t believe…”
I don’t regret going to Boston. I wouldn’t want to live through it again, but I don’t regret it and I don’t sit here today and wish for things to have been different. Really the only thing I would say about Boston is that I wish I had been a little more stubborn about listening to my body.
As for the rest of it … well, of course, in a perfect world it would have gone better, but in the end it served a purpose. Here I was at the ripe old age of forty-two, out of my comfort zone, making rookie mistakes, and being pushed and challenged in ways that I hadn’t been for quite some time. It wasn’t comfortable, but it certainly was purposeful. The undeniable truth was that I was an old veteran who still had a lot to learn.
Chapter Fourteen
SUCCESS AND FAILURE
Pitching for the Boston Red Sox proved to be one of the few challenges in my career that I was unable to overcome. With almost every other challenge that had been presented to me, I had always found a way, within the given time frame, to make things work. In Boston, what I really ran out of was time. In the window I was allotted, I wasn’t able to do what I was really hoping to do.
While I had experienced failure in Boston, I didn’t view the entire experience, or even myself personally, as a failure. This might not sound like much, but when my life was turning upside down in the aftermath of being released, it was this perspective on success and failure—a perspective that had been honed through years and years of dealing with adversity—that really carried me through. I just had to remind myself to apply the very same principles I had been preaching to others for years and years at this point.
For the better part of my career as a player, I did motivational speaking, and it’s something I still do today. When I first started speaking to groups, I realized that while I thought I had some compelling and inspiring stories, and of course my testimony, to share, if I wanted to have an impact, if I wanted to motivate people to make real changes in their lives, I was going to have to work a little harder. I had to think up a way to give the folks in the audience something—some kind of tool, if you will—that they could easily pick up and use in their own lives. My trick for doing this was devising two acronyms, one for success and one for failure. If people were going to remember anything I said, I figured this was my best shot. And to be honest, I always thought I sounded like a pretty smart baseball player whenever I used a word like acronym in a speech.
Now, don’t judge me, you obviously have to stretch a little bit for some of this, but for success, I came up with “Striving Under Constant Challenges and Enduring Stressful Situations.” For failure, I came up with “Fear And Insecurity Lead to Un Realistic Expectations.” I use these acronyms, paired with stories from my career and my journey in faith, in an attempt to get people to think seriously about their own ideas about success and failure.
To me, there’s a little irony in motivational speaking, or at least my style of motivational speaking anyway. When a group invites me to speak, more often than not they want me to come to inspire people to chase and achieve their dreams. They want me to talk about success, but in reality, I’m really going to talk more about failure. The truth is, one of the keys to my success has been how well I have handled failure. Embracing failure has helped me become the pitcher that I was and the man that I am today.
In my speeches, I naturally cycle back to some of the worst moments in my career, like starting a season 2–11, or giving up eight runs in two-thirds of an inning, and I tell people what I had to do to overcome those obstacles. I tell them about my mind-set and how I would have to tell myself, I’m not going to give in, I’m not going to give up; I’m going to rally. I really try to teach people a new way of looking at failure, not to look at it as a signal for quitting time, but to see it as a crucial stepping-stone to success.
I think it’s pretty clear that my career wasn’t all about natural talent; I wasn’t sprinkled with any magic dust. I wasn’t the fastest or the strongest or even the smartest, but I would argue that whatever I lacked in sheer talent, I made up for along the way with tenacity and perseverance; a lot of my success was achieved by constantly learning, adapting, and overcoming obstacles.
I’m convinced that these are traits that can be learned and applied by anyone at any stage of their life. It matters not how old you are, how talented you are, or how much money you make right now—these are not the determining factors in whether or not you can be successful. The determining factors will be your passion, your desire, and your ability to truly accept responsibility for where you are in life, to recognize and embrace your own God-given strengths and weaknesses as well as the outside factors that you cannot control. If you can step back and look at everything and say, “So be it,” you’ve taken the first step toward realizing your dreams. The next step is putting forth an earnest effort to make the most out of whatever you have. I’m telling you, if you do this, you can achieve things you never thought possible.
While I certainly hope that a few of my words throughout the years have resonated with folks and made a positive difference in their lives, there aren’t any convenient statistics, as there are in baseball, to help gauge my effectiveness. Regardless of that fact, I can tell you for certain that learning has definitely taken place. I know this because along the way I’ve been the one who has been constantly reminded that I still have a long way to go. Frankly, I never would have guessed how much I stood to learn from motivational speaking.
The first time I really faced this reality was at a Fellowship for Christian Athletes event in Tennessee. In the days leading up to the speech, I had thought up this great plan to share my testimony and talk about the transforming power of God in my life. I was convinced it was going to be amazing. Everything was going fine—until I actually got to the podium. As I stood there, I was distracted by the unmistakable twinge of hypocrisy in my heart. While everything I was about to say was true, I couldn’t escape the fact that I didn’t feel like I was truly living the best Christian example at that point. After standing there for a moment in the awkward silence, considering my options, I just looked at the crowd and confessed.
“I had something here on my notes that I wanted to tell you,” I started, “but I’m just going to be gut-honest with you right now. I haven’t read my Bible in a week. The tru
th is, I stand before you today guilty of becoming complacent. The truth is, I probably need this talk more today, than some of you.”
I really didn’t know how everybody was going to react, but from what I could tell, my words seemed to resonate with the crowd. I went on with my speech in a completely different direction than I had planned, but it seemed to be just as effective, if not more so. When I talked to people afterward, they told me it was really refreshing to hear a pro athlete just be honest and human. Ever since then, it’s become my habit to open faith-based speeches with the following message: “The divine appointment that I have tonight is for me to hear what I am about to tell you, because I need to hear what I am about to tell you.” It always comes out a little weird and people always have to sit there and think about it for a minute, but it helps me set the right tone both for me and for the audience. It’s important for me to note that no matter what I’ve achieved in this life, it’s always a constant process of two steps forward and one step back. And sometimes in the midst of that natural ebb and flow, I find myself drifting along and becoming complacent, despite my best intentions.
I never would have imagined the role that motivational speaking has had in my life. Beyond the fact that it has helped keep me from slipping into neutral at times, it has on occasion shown me the true power of God. In fact, the first time I ever felt the presence of God was actually during a speech I made in Atlanta.
I know that a lot people struggle to understand what it means when someone says something like I’ve just said. You know, “What do you mean, you felt God? What do you mean when you say He spoke to you?” To be honest, I didn’t really understand it until it started happening to me. Through the years, as I grew in my faith, I started to feel God’s little nudges from time to time, but it wasn’t until after I truly accepted Christ that I truly felt the extraordinary experience of God literally lifting me up and carrying me through something that I knew I was not capable of doing on my own.