The Wax Pack

by Brad Balukjian

  “It was a very dysfunctional family. I was close to him. When he wasn’t drinking he was the greatest guy in the world. But he’d show up at a baseball game and be half in the bag, yelling and screaming. It was embarrassing.”

  When Boomer finally made it to the Major Leagues and had a game in Cincinnati, his dad got so drunk that he passed out in the clubhouse. They became estranged. Even if his dad came to a game, Boomer wouldn’t acknowledge him.

  On the playing field, Boomer’s dad couldn’t hurt him. All that anger was bottled up in his six feet and 190 pounds.

  “He was the most aggressive kid I ever saw,” his high school baseball and football coach, Ron Brookey, said.4

  He blossomed, a three-sport star (football, basketball, and baseball) and cross-town rival of future Hall of Famer Mike Schmidt. The Dodgers took Boomer in the fourth round of the 1967 draft.

  As a player he was often described as “fearless,” blocking home plate like a brick wall, salivating for a collision. He had learned the cruel nature of fear at an early age and that the only way to overcome it, ironically, is to accept it. He made many mistakes off the field, but never once because he was afraid. When he found himself unsigned following the 1986 season, cast off by the Seattle Mariners and a victim of the owners’ collusion scandal, he became so depressed that he couldn’t watch baseball on TV. His second marriage had fallen apart a few years prior, and he still wanted to play. He had some gas left in the tank. But he found no takers, forced to retire in 1987 at age thirty-eight.

  He had partied hard his whole career. Alcohol was part of his daily routine. Given those demons, most people would have sunk even deeper into the booze. But not Boomer. He poured out all his bottles in February 1987 and hasn’t had a drop since. Like his failed marriages, he faced the problem, accepted it, and moved on.

  “Once it’s gone, it’s gone,” he says.

  Although his playing days were numbered, Boomer could never get baseball out of his system. He didn’t want to. Ever since getting on a plane scared shitless for the first time at age eighteen to fly from Dayton to Chicago to Salt Lake City to Ogden, he had been part of a sacred fraternity. And so he went to work in Hollywood, consulting on Major League and its sequel; he cohosted a radio show; and in the late 1990s, he got back on the Minor League bus, back where it all started, with ten-hour road trips through charmed deserts and cow country, all for love of the game.

  We’ve been chatting for more than an hour without a single mention of Tommy Lasorda or the Dodgers’ famous Garvey-Russell-Cey-Lopes infield, which stuck together for nine seasons, topics he still gets asked about every day but that don’t offer me anything new. He’s got to get his car washed, and so I ask if we can meet up again tomorrow, maybe at Jersey Mike’s, to continue the conversation.

  “I have to try and move some things and won’t know until later tonight or tomorrow morning. My wife has me booked,” he says.

  “Does she run your show?” I ask, needling him.

  He chuckles. “You must not be married.”

  A few minutes later I sit in the front seat of my Honda in the Jersey Mike’s parking lot, staring at the layer of dust coating the tan plastic dashboard. That sour taste of coffee lingers in my mouth as I cradle my third cup, long past the point of diminishing caffeine returns. I stare at the dark brown liquid, some of the cream starting to separate ever so slightly on the surface, then touch the liquid to my lips and frown on lukewarm contact—I am disgusted by it and yet still want more.

  Down the road about twenty-five miles is the one-bedroom apartment where I lived with Kay and waged my war against OCD, where fear beat me up before I knew that the only way to fight back was to not fight back at all. There’s an important distinction between resignation and acceptance. Not fighting back doesn’t mean letting fear roll over you, it just means not resisting. I wish I had met Boomer ten years ago. He knew then what I know now and what eventually allowed me to overcome my own demons: your brain can be full of shit.

  The only way to beat the unwanted thoughts is to accept them, to invite the fear over to dinner rather than shutting it out. If OCD screams, “What if you left the iron on?” and you reply, “So what if I did?” without resisting the thought, then it loses all its power, creating a form of radical acceptance. OCD is simply one face of fear, and although Boomer may not be familiar with that face, he knows its other guises.

  I wipe my index finger across the dashboard, creating a trail through the veil of dust.

  I was right. Steve Yeager is a complex man.

  * * *

  *

  The next morning I meet Boomer at his Jersey Mike’s, located in a shopping plaza in Granada Hills next to a Fantastic Sam’s and an H&R Block. He wasn’t kidding: the walls are void of anything baseball related, and the interior is a brightly lit hive of young employees in their uniforms of navy blue aprons, hats, and polos with the Jersey Mike’s logo. His wife, Charlene, is in charge here, while Boomer settles into the ambassador role that he has always done so well, checking up on the staff and remembering their birthdays.

  “I feel like a mother hen sometimes, ya know?” he said yesterday.

  He is nowhere to be found, so I wander to the back of the building, where I see him standing by his black Mercedes dragging on a cigarette. He’s got a different Hawaiian shirt on, this one more orange but still splashed with fronds, along with khaki shorts and the same loafers.

  “I feel like a jerk having invited you out for a drink the other day,” I confess. “I had no idea you didn’t drink anymore.”

  He puffs out a trail of smoke and answers in his gravelly voice.

  “Nah, I’ve got twenty-seven years of sobriety. February of ’87. If I could quit cigarettes, I’d quit them too. I’ve tried a thousand times. So now I’m on Chantix, and I picked a date to have my last cigarette. July 4.”

  Easy day to remember.

  Other than the smoking habit, Boomer’s in great health considering his Humpty Dumpty past. He had three surgeries on his left knee, broke his left leg, broke both wrists, broke both ankles, and broke several fingers during his years on the field, not to mention suffering countless concussions.

  Like everything else, Boomer is nonchalant about it: “You go to bed with a toothache, you wake up with a toothache. You live with it. That’s what you do.”

  We move inside and grab a booth in the back where Boomer can lean back against the wall. He’s not a big man, but he is broad, and I can imagine him being an imposing obstacle blocking home plate. The rules surrounding home-plate collisions have changed since Boomer’s days—a catcher is no longer allowed to stand in front of home when a runner is bearing down on him trying to score, and as a result, the bone-crunching home-plate collision is a thing of the past.

  “I understand why they’re doing it, because they have to protect the high-priced players. But the guys that did get run over and did get crushed at the plate all those years, what did we do it for?”

  One of the staff, a blond girl wearing the uniform of blue polo and khakis, walks by and says hi.

  “Things good?” Boomer asks her on her way to the kitchen, breaking our discussion to chitchat for a moment.

  She smiles and nods.

  “Do you ever go back there and cook?” I ask him.

  “Do I cook?” he replies, incredulous. “I don’t do shit back there,” he replies.

  A few minutes later, his youngest son, Evan, breezes in, fresh from summer baseball practice at Pierce College. Long and lanky, Evan, a rising sophomore, has followed in Dad’s footsteps as a catcher.

  “He’s pretty good,” Boomer tells me. “He needs to work more on the bat, but it’s coming.”

  Like father, like son.

  Boomer has three kids, all boys, one from his second marriage and two with Charlene (he didn’t have any kids with his first wife, whom he met in high school). Evan is the youngest and the only one still living at home. He’s got a beard that doesn’t quite connect, adding some g
ravitas to his baby face. He grabs a pad from behind the counter.

  “What are you having?” Boomer asks him. “Are you going to take something home to Mom?”

  Evan scribbles down our lunch orders and disappears in the back for a while. When he returns, I ask, “Do you get a lot of good catching advice from this guy?”

  “Yeah,” he replies.

  “You don’t have to lie.”

  “No, I do. He’s taught me a lot about the mental aspects of the game, the whole aspect of calling a game, thinking a couple pitches ahead . . .”

  He goes on for a while, explaining just how helpful Boomer is. He’s clearly his father’s son, immediately slipping into camera-ready role as he talks with ease. While he holds court, Boomer sits to his right, face forward, ears perked.

  “We’ll be watching a game, and when the pitcher throws, he [Boomer] will ask, ‘Why did he throw that pitch?’ If there’s a certain situation, what does it entail? If I really need a ground ball, what should my pitcher throw to get a ground ball?”

  Boomer interjects, “And what would that be?”

  “Probably an off-speed pitch low and away.”

  “Maybe a sinker?” Boomer suggests.

  “No one has a sinker,” Evan replies.

  “Okay, then a slider.”

  A slider. It’s settled then. And making me hungry—while Jersey Mike’s doesn’t have sliders on the menu, my sandwich arrives and I dig in.

  “What do you think people get wrong about you?” I ask Boomer.

  He pauses to consider.

  “Uh, there might be some people that think I’m tougher than I look. Don’t let the facial expression get you. I can sit there and watch a game with my glasses on and look like I’m boring a hole through you, but I might not be,” he says.

  “Ya know, if the kids do something good, I cry,” he adds.

  “Well that’s for sure,” Evan chimes in, ribbing his dad.

  Evan is optimistic about his chances for the upcoming year. He’s working hard this summer, getting the countless reps needed to master the craft of “receiving” (the word “catching” doesn’t quite capture the artistry of the position, he explains to me). He started playing a lot more in the second half of last season and thinks the job is his for the taking.

  Boomer taught him early on that there’s a right way and a wrong way to play the game. One memory stands out for Evan, a game when he walked onto the field to start a new inning and heard a loud and familiar voice from the stands.

  “Don’t walk, run!” the voice boomed. The voice was unmistakable. His dad’s words crossed into his mind as he broke into a trot: It’s a privilege to be on that field. You never take that for granted. Always run, never walk.

  Unlike his own father, passed out drunk in the clubhouse, Boomer is always there for his kids, heard before he’s seen.

  * * *

  *

  I open up my road atlas, the Bay Area pages so worn they fall out, and study the map of the United States. Tomorrow I’ll finish the California leg by driving to San Diego to meet Garry Templeton, and then it’s a long haul on I-10 to Houston, where Gary Pettis may or may not be waiting.

  My hands grip the map tightly as my eyes wander off the interstate in Texas and settle on Austin, not that far from Houston, not that far out of my way. That’s where Kay now lives with her husband and two kids. I haven’t seen her since I walked out in 2006 after making a mistake that ended our relationship. A mistake that sent me packing to Northern California.

  I haven’t looked back. Until now.

  4

  Camp Templeton

  I wasn’t that black kid that was kissing white butt. I was an outspoken young black man that was making hundreds of thousands of dollars. And everybody said, “You should be keeping your mouth shut.”

  —Garry Templeton

  Days 6–7

  June 24–25, 2015

  Miles driven: 813

  Cups of coffee: 13

  Los Angeles CA to San Marcos CA

  August 26, 1981

  That goddamn left knee.

  The ankle too. The pain, dull at times, searing at others, has robbed Garry Templeton of the explosiveness that made him a number 1 draft pick and two-time All-Star.

  “Baseball is an eyes, feet, hands game,” Tempy is fond of saying.

  Eyes, feet, hands.

  “There’s three things you’ve got to do as a hitter. See the ball, get your body in position, and let your hands fly,” he says.

  4. Garry Templeton

  But how do you get through step 2 when you’re playing on one leg?

  Tempy’s left knee has been his albatross ever since he tore cartilage in a Minor League game in 1974, cooling his meteoric rise. His career began on the ball fields of balmy Orange County, California, in the city of Santa Ana, where his raw athletic gifts dazzled. When he was five feet, nine inches tall and still growing (he’d max out two inches later), he could already dunk a basketball, and family lore says he could throw a football sixty yards at age fifteen. The only thing that has ever held him back was the perception that he wasn’t giving his all. Even in his senior-year baseball-team photo at Santa Ana Valley High, he’s smiling at three-quarters, his head tilted twenty degrees, his hands crossed behind his back. His insouciance frustrated his coaches and teachers and made his mom, Otella, and dad, Spiavia (pronounced “Spivey”), mad as hell at times; they knew all too well how tough life could be and wondered why their preternaturally talented son didn’t seem to care more. Before they moved from Odessa, Texas, in 1963 (Otella left first when she grew tired of Spiavia’s drinking, taking the five kids along), they worked so hard that they barely saw each other. Otella made screws and bolts on the graveyard shift for Standard Press Steel, slept two hours, and then cleaned houses all day; before he got hurt on the job, Spiavia spent most of his day hunched over or lying on his back, changing flat tires for trucks stalled on the freeway.

  Otella and Spiavia had raised all their kids with a strong work ethic, but Tempy made it all look so easy. Signed in the first round by the St. Louis Cardinals in 1974 with a $44,500 bonus, he had been crowned (cursed?) as baseball royalty in the infancy of his career, compared to Willie Mays by Hall of Famer Lou Brock, and rewarded before the 1980 season with a contract that made him the highest-paid player in Cardinals history.

  When he leans over to tie his cleats and gingerly flex that goddamned left knee, it drives him crazy to know that he is a much, much better player than his .261 batting average, as of today, indicates.

  His frustration has been building, not just with his knee but also with his jealous teammates who feed manager Whitey Herzog a stream of questionable intelligence about Tempy’s alleged behavior.

  Tempy’s hanging out with the wrong crowd, they whisper.

  He’s on something.

  He’s got no heart.

  What these snitches do not know is how badly Tempy is hurting, inside and out. He had tried to talk to Whitey about his knee and ankle, asking to sit out some games. Whitey had let him rest for three games before returning him to the lineup last night, in which he got one hit in five at bats. He put Tempy back in the lineup again today but told him to take his time getting to first if he hit a routine ground ball, figuring that extra hustle wasn’t worth the injury risk. Tempy understands, is grateful even, for his manager’s compassion.

  In the bottom of the first inning, he strides to home plate to face the Giants’ Gary Lavelle in front of a sparse crowd of 7,766. Lavelle strikes him out, but the third strike bounces in the dirt in front of catcher Milt May, making it a live ball. Heeding his manager’s earlier words, Tempy takes a few perfunctory steps toward first base and then trots toward the dugout, conceding defeat.

  Tempy is just following orders, nursing his bad wheel, but to the die-hard Cardinals fans in attendance, he is loafing.

  St. Louis takes its baseball very seriously. The franchise dates back to 1882, has won more World Series titles than any club
save the Yankees, and until the Dodgers and Giants moved to California in 1958 was the westernmost team in baseball.

  As Tempy walks back to the dugout, he’s greeted with a salvo of ice cubes. He looks up and sees a group of seven men who have crept down to the front row, foaming at the mouth.

  “Dirty n——!” they yell.

  Glaring back, Tempy tenses as he reaches down and grabs his crotch.

  “Suck my dick!” he roars back.

  Over the next couple of innings, the hecklers become relentless. Doubling down, Tempy grabs his crotch again, smacks his right bicep with his left hand while making a fist with his right, and complains to home plate umpire Bruce Froemming. When Tempy makes more obscene gestures in the third inning, Froemming ejects him, citing a rule about “unbecoming player conduct.”

  As soon as he gets to the dugout, Whitey reaches for Tempy’s jersey to haul him in, creating an iconic photograph that runs in the paper the next day and that shows Whitey gritting his teeth and tugging on Tempy. What the camera does not capture and what most people don’t realize because of the way it is reported (“Herzog grabbed Templeton by his shirt and pulled him down the dugout steps,” writes the St. Louis Post-Dispatch) is that a moment later Tempy pushes Whitey back down the steps.1 Whitey is mad, but Tempy is livid.

  The next morning, the photo is splashed on the front page of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch with the headline “Templeton Apology Demanded.” The story, by Neal Russo, never mentions the racial epithets or ice cubes hurled at Tempy. While Tempy does not comment, Whitey has plenty to say: “There’s no ballplayer big enough to show up the fans and make the gestures he was making. When he grows up to be a man and publicly apologizes to our fans and to his teammates, he can come back and play. It’s up to him.”

  Following the game, Whitey suspends Tempy indefinitely and fines him $5,000. Tempy leaves without saying a word. At season’s end, he’s shipped off to the San Diego Padres for another shortstop by the name of Ozzie Smith, who will one day make the Hall of Fame.