Derek Lowe said that Wakefield wasn’t the only team member bothered by me, but that by then everyone knew what they were getting.
“When Pedro started it, oh boy, you better get ear plugs, because it’s going to be nonstop,” said Lowe. “So some guys would make a joke like, ‘Hey, dude, don’t you have to go work out?’ to try to get him out of the dugout. But he’s a very loving and outgoing guy—that’s just his personality. He’s a free spirit. And he just kind of beats to his own drum. I’m not saying he didn’t have respect for what was going on around him, like Wake pitching, but he didn’t even think about it.”
Wakefield and I having words was just one of those things that pop up in the course of a baseball season. We were fine.
I was always fine with Manny as well, even if he continued to confound everyone else. Just because we were teammates did not mean any of us understood Manny better than anybody else did. That was a big part of his appeal. Everything seemed out of place without Manny being in la-la land, keeping us guessing what he would come up with next. How was he going to wear his hair? Why did he spray me with half a bottle of his cologne? Why did he just ask me, “Hey, did you know there are men on their way to the moon right now?”
Once, he came up to my locker and put on my socks and my underwear and then he went over to David Ortiz’s locker and put on his undershirt.
“Why are you doing that, Manny?”
“I don’t know. Do you?”
“No, I really don’t.”
“Did you know I’ve got three little midgets working on me all the time in my head? Today they needed different clothes to wear.”
I guess that’s the way Manny would pass his time. That’s how he clipped his flowers.
He put in his work too, in his own way. He’d come into the video room, where Billy Broadbent was, and start looking at clips of upcoming pitchers. He’d sit there, babbling nonsense to Billy or to me, while swiping at the laptop mouse like he was banging on a bongo drum, glancing at the video, then moving on to the next one, always keeping up his nonsensical banter.
He was a kid, one I wanted to take care of. On the road, he sometimes was afraid to go to sleep by himself. He’d come up to my room, where David and some teammates and I would be hanging out. After a while, we’d look over and there would be Manny, under my covers, fully dressed, snoring. I always had a suite with an extra bed, so I didn’t mind if he had a sleepover. That was just Manny being Manny.
In August, my mood soured again with the media when a case of pharyngitis and stomach problems sent me to the hospital. Eyebrows were raised about how sick I was, and when Manny got his own bout of pharyngitis, we got lumped together as a couple of slackers.
I pitched well over my last 20 starts: 10-2, 1.92 ERA, with 144 strikeouts and a .219 batting average against over 126⅓ innings. In September, I went 4-0 with an 0.20 ERA. That was a tough season for our bullpen-by-committee, particularly when I was pitching.
I finished third in the Cy Young voting that season. No complaints here.
We had one excellent baseball team in 2003. We finished with a 95-67 record, six games behind the Yankees but still good enough to be the American League wild card.
The 2003 postseason beckoned.
This looked like it could very well turn into the year the Red Sox finally went all the way, and I wanted to be right smack in the middle of all the drama and all the joy.
I got half of that wish right.
23
Blame Game
REPETE, REPETE.
Respect, respect.
From the day I was old enough to listen, “respect” was the word my parents and their generation preached constantly. Respect for your elders. I could not raise an eyebrow, never mind my voice, at an elder. If I ever had a quarrel or reason to disagree, it was my responsibility to remember to behave and turn the other cheek.
I can only wish I had recalled those voices on October 11, 2003.
When 72-year-old Don Zimmer came barreling toward me, calling me a “son of a bitch” and raising his left hand to hit me, I wish he had never stumbled and fallen toward me and that I had never grabbed his head and pushed him to the Fenway grass.
I wish that when he made a beeline for me, I had tiptoed two steps backwards and kept backing away, letting the “Raging Gerbil” dive onto the grass like a lineman missing a tackle. But if he had managed to stay upright and correct his course, I wish I had turned and headed for the hills, fast enough to keep him nipping at my heels, like a panel from an old-time cartoon strip—a beet-faced, roly-poly old man chasing after the high-striding baseball player in front of 34,000 fans laughing their heads off.
But in the heat and confusion of the moment I made the wrong decision, one I still am paying for. Some days I feel like there are more people who remember me as the angry young man who pushed down a defenseless old man than as the pitcher who won three Cy Young Awards and a world title and wound up with some nice numbers.
In my entire career as a baseball player, my reaction to the late Don Zimmer’s charge remains my one and only regret.
I was embarrassed, just as he was embarrassed and remorseful.
I can’t defend what I did.
Like most of what happened to me and the Red Sox in the 2003 postseason, it defied easy explanation.
Our 2003 team was stacked.
Once David became a fixture in the middle of the lineup with Manny and Nomar alongside him, Johnny Damon at the top, and hitters like Bill Mueller, Kevin Millar, Trot Nixon, Todd Walker, and Jason Varitek, who had one of his best seasons on offense, we had the best run-producing and power-hitting lineup in the league by a healthy margin. Big Bird, Wakey, John Burkett, and I were the big four in the rotation. Our bullpen took a while to sort itself out after the bullpen-by-committee experiment wound up in the trash alongside Jeremy Giambi. By June, we traded for closer Byung-Hyun Kim, who helped stabilize the back end of the bullpen, where Mike Timlin, Alan Embree, and Scott Williamson steadily improved as the season went along. The bullpen took a big step forward in the second half of the season, transforming itself from a liability into a strength.
Only the Yankees and A’s had better records than us in 2003. In the first round of the playoffs, we wound up playing the A’s, who had one more win, 96, than us.
They had a rotation fronted by Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder, and Barry Zito, in that order, plus they had a bona fide closer, free-agent-to-be Keith Foulke. Their offense was below-average, but that pitching was solid, and it held our hitters to five runs in the first two games on the West Coast. In Game 1, my first postseason game since Game 5 of the 1999 ALCS, I labored, needing 130 pitches in seven innings, and walking four batters, allowing six hits and three runs. The game went 12 innings. We scored just four runs in that first game, and only one in the next, and we came back to Fenway Park in another do-or-die situation, just like 1999.
The 2003 Red Sox were a little different from that team, or any team I had played for, with one exception to come.
We were in “Cowboy Up” mode in 2003—Kevin Millar’s free spirit had infected all of us and helped lighten my mostly dark mood that season. The “Rally Karaoke Guy” video that the Fenway Park scoreboard operators began to play made Millar look ridiculous, but in a good way. That year Millar was a bigger goofball than me. He really didn’t care that people were laughing at him, because the more loco he acted the more we won.
Before Game 3, Millar was behind an almost teamwide shaved-heads program, one that I boycotted. In the game, Eric Byrnes and Miguel Tejada each made some rookie-like base-running mistakes, which led to Trot’s walk-off home run in the 11th inning. We took Game 4 as well and headed back to Oakland for the next day’s finale, featuring me as the starter.
The media wanted to know how I fared on the cross-country flight back to Oakland, but I was still boycotting the media.
“We didn’t spend a lot of quality time together last night on the flight,” Grady said. “We wanted to make sure he
was comfortable on the flight. The trip I took back to the back of the plane, he was stretched out across three seats and had a tent over him. It looked like my grandson playing in the living room, to tell you the truth. He had a tent over all the seats, and I didn’t want to disturb him. He looked comfortable to me.”
On a couple of occasions, the nice people on the Red Sox media relations staff asked me to speak with the media, but nobody could convince me why I should.
Barry Zito and I matched up in Game 5, and I pitched better. We were up, 4–2, in the eighth when I gave up another run quickly. Grady got me out of there after my 100th pitch. Alan Embree came in with no outs, one on, and the go-ahead run at the plate: he got two hitters out quickly, and then Mike Timlin got the third.
In the ninth, the A’s had the bases loaded with two outs and Terence Long at the plate when Big Bird threw the nastiest pitch I ever saw him throw: a two-seam fastball that tailed in and caught the inner half of the plate, right at Long’s knees. Long froze. Strike three, series over. Time for a champagne shower and then hop back on the plane and head to the East Coast to face the Yankees in the ALCS once again.
Roger Clemens and I were on the same schedule, meaning we drew starts for Game 3 at Fenway Park on October 11. After we split the first two games in New York, the hype around another Pedro-Roger matchup had reached even crazier heights. Our fans and the media smelled blood. I stayed as distant and aloof from it as I could. I never gained an inch from giving honest responses to the millionth question about the Red Sox–Yankees rivalry, and this time was no different.
Those four coast-to-coast trips from Boston to Oakland for that Division Series and then back to New York wiped me out even more than usual. The bad night’s sleep before my Game 5 start played a large part, but I didn’t get much rest in New York either.
Before that Game 3 start, I felt beat up and still jet-lagged. There was no way I was going to start speaking to the media then, so I skipped my media session the day before my Game 3 start, leaving it to Grady to answer questions about my pitching and my zipped lips.
“We have had conversations with him about it, but when he got into this mode about the middle of the season was about the time he started getting really good results on the mound,” said Grady. “I think the day is coming that he will again speak with the press, but right now he wants to continue doing what he has been doing and try not to break his karma.”
My karma was on the blink. I pitched tired.
We jumped out to a 2–0 lead, but Karim Garcia knocked in a run against me in the second, and then Derek Jeter hit a home run in the third to tie the game. In the fourth, I began by walking Jorge Posada, who was somebody I owned at that point, and allowing a single to Nick Johnson, and then Hideki Matsui doubled in Posada. The Yankees had the lead, there were no runs, and first base was open. I was much more pissed about losing the lead than worried about Garcia at that point. Jason set up down low, looking for a low-and-inside pitch, but I was trying to go up and in.
I did a lousy job of it. I was paying too much attention to Matsui at second base and I landed early with my plant leg, which meant the ball airmailed on me. The ball sailed high, but so far inside that it was headed behind Garcia’s helmet, about six inches behind it. He ducked down in time and the ball grazed—if you could call it that—his back left shoulder. Garcia looked only surprised at first, but then he decided to engage me in a stare-down, and I could see in that instant he had become furious.
Both Jason and the home plate umpire stepped in front of him quickly to make sure he wasn’t going to do something stupid like come after me. Jason came out to talk to me while I stared some more at Garcia. After the umpire finally decided that Garcia had been hit by the pitch and warned both benches that further inside pitching would not be tolerated, Garcia took first base.
Remember, first base was empty, but there were two base runners at second and third and we were behind by one run—in a series tied at one apiece.
Karim Garcia, my easy out, my number-eight hitter, thought I would hit him to load the bases?
Karim Garcia?
Who was Karim Garcia?
Hello? Knock knock? Somebody needed to wake up Karim. Somebody needed to remind this kid that the pitcher on the mound had a pedigree and enough experience to make him reconsider. “Hey, think about the game, don’t get caught up in the hype.”
I don’t know if Karim’s outburst meant he was under the influence of steroids or not, but it sure rang a bell with me of what people back then used to call “’roid rage.” What could he have been thinking? Jesus Christ. There was nothing—nothing—going on in terms of retaliation. If there was, right now would be a good time to fess up because I’m fessing up about other things, but there was nothing there. It was an accident. The way he reacted made me wonder if he had staged the whole act. Did he and the Yankees plan to make a big deal about any inside pitch I threw to try to get me out of the game? I had to move on from the mind games, even if the Yankees could not. By then, my pitch to Garcia had gotten Zimmer all riled up. He was chirping at me before my next batter, Alfonso Soriano, hit a sharp ground ball to Nomar at shortstop, who started a double play with second baseman Todd Walker. It meant a run scored and the Yankees had a two-run lead, but the two outs were important.
The problem was that everyone in the stadium saw Garcia take out his frustration with a late and spikes-high takeout slide on Walker at second base. I was right behind the mound, so I had a good look at the dirty play. He was trying to hurt Walker. When he came off the field, he started barking at me, telling me not to hit him. I made sure to tell him, in Spanish, “There’s no need to hit you, you dumb-ass. Don’t you see the situation? Play the game clean.”
And that’s when Posada came up out of the dugout and started popping off. He was trying to stand up for Garcia, which is what any teammate would do, but he was trying to be too much of a leader when he made a costly error with his word choice. He cursed my mom. He mother-fucked her. “We’re going to get your ass, motherfucker,” he said in Spanish, adding that if I wanted to fight, to come on over and fight him. I had no reason to fight him. I never had any problems with Posada. I used to make fun of him and call him “Dumbo” because his ears stuck out, but that was playful—a joke.
But cursing my mom?
That’s an unforgivable sin with me. Baseball was baseball, family was family, and with me, they didn’t mix.
I offered him advice, free of charge.
“Never forget what you just said, because I won’t forget it,” I yelled, pointing to my head, because that’s where my brain is, and my brain is where memories are kept. I’m not the only human being with that setup. When I pointed to my head, I was saying, “Yes, I’m going to plunk you next time because I’ll remember what you said about my mother, and if you want to fight then, let’s fight.”
What I was not saying when I pointed to my head was that I was going to hit him in the head. But a few of the Yankees didn’t take it that way. Most of the Yankees, except for Jeter, got up and out of their seats, and other shitty guys like Posada began yelling at me even more.
On TV, Tim McCarver didn’t hear what was going on, just like most of the non-Spanish-speaking Yankees didn’t know what Posada had said. McCarver only saw me pointing to my head, so that meant Tim knew the whole story and could tell the millions of people watching at home what a turd I was. McCarver announced that I was saying, “‘I’ll hit you in the head.’ I mean, c’mon. If that’s not inciteful, I don’t know what is.”
Yankees manager Joe Torre didn’t think that was what I meant. He thought I was just trying to say, “Think,” which was a lot closer to the truth than most.
A cluster of Yankees, including Clemens and Zimmer, were extremely agitated at this point and clumped together in front of their dugout. Both benches had been warned, and Torre was trying to stick up for his guys with the crew chief, Tim McClelland. After another minute, we resumed playing baseball. Enrique Wilson, who
had gone 7-for-8 against me and was a .476 career hitter against me, popped up to Walker to end the inning.
In the bottom of the fourth, it was Manny against Roger. Manny fell behind, 1-2, when Roger threw a pitch up and in but not that close at all to Manny. I didn’t see anything wrong with the pitch, so I didn’t think anything was going to happen, but Manny’s nerves, or something else, had put him on edge after all that happened. He took offense. He yelled and pointed at Roger and took a couple of steps toward him, and boom—the match fell into the fuel tank. Both benches sprinted out of their dugouts like the gun had just been fired at the start of a 100-meter race. There weren’t a lot of punches thrown, but everyone in a uniform was on the field. I stepped warily out of our dugout. I didn’t think it would be too smart to get in the middle of that scrum. I let the big guys duke it out. I was just standing there, my red jacket on to keep my arm warm, when my eyes widened.
Oh my God, Don Zimmer was running straight at me. I’d been charged on the mound before, but never off it, and here came a 72-year-old heading right at me.
What in holy hell was happening?
He was mumbling as he got close to me and just as he got real close he also cursed my mom.
“I’ll tell you what, you son of a bitch.”
“What?” I said as he got real close to me, his left arm raised, but that’s when he started to lose his balance. All I did was help him fall faster.
At first I thought that if he was coming toward me, I would just try to grab him and hold on to him, but he tried to throw a punch and he said what he said, so I had to step back and make sure he got by me. Pure instinct. I knew he was going to the ground, but I also felt he wasn’t going to hurt himself.
Andy Pettitte came over and he was laughing.
He said, “Zim, what are you doing?”
Posada was right in front of me, and I waited for him to do or say anything, never taking my eyes off of him. He did nothing. The fight broke up as everyone tended to Zimmer, who had a scratch in between his eyes but luckily was fine.
Pedro Page 24