The Wax Pack

by Brad Balukjian

  Leyva thought he was being refreshing, feeding the media raw honesty and hoping it would kick his players in the ass, but to Don it was just stupid, a public betrayal of what should remain in the temple of the clubhouse. So in what is otherwise a meaningless game in a meaningless season, his next start against the Dodgers (who are scuffling in the hangover of a World Series victory), Don has a chance at redemption: a strong outing would make the Cubs fiasco look like an anomaly, and perhaps Leyva would start to rebuild his faith in him.

  Closing his eyes and raising his clasped hands over his head, he practices his windup in slow motion, feeling his weight shift from his back foot to his front as his arm whips forward to release the imaginary ball. The night before he pitches is always like this, an anxious dress rehearsal in his underwear.

  Attack. Attack.

  Resetting his arms and legs for another practice pitch in the mirror, Don looks down at his left hand, examining the quarter-inch bulge of bone at the base of his left thumb. He flexes his hand, thinking back to the car accident more than two and a half years ago that forced him to relearn how to pitch. The physical strength had returned, but it had felt like one step forward, one step back ever since. He had come back too soon, reporting to spring training and telling the team he was fine, great actually, even though his hand felt like it was being smashed by a hammer every time he gripped the ball to throw. To say anything else was unthinkable—you always felt “fine.”

  Attack. Attack.

  Later that evening, under an overcast evening sky, Don walks out to the mound at Veterans Stadium to begin warming up. The Phillies had trained him well, teaching him from the beginning of his Minor League journey to grab the opposition by the throat and squeeze. The adrenaline pumps through his veins, his breath quickening, his heart loud in his chest. The Dodgers are Mr. Moore, his brothers, and his father all rolled into one blue-and-gray monster that he now needs to slay. His catcher and buddy, Darren Daulton, who has been with him since the low Minor Leagues, crouches behind home plate, ready to receive.

  The first inning is always a struggle, quieting the butterflies enough to get locked into a groove. He never could understand the advice of “just relax out there.” This is war.

  Come out hard. Fastballs down. Pound it down.

  Alfredo Griffin, the Dodgers’ free-swinging leadoff hitter, begins his strut to home plate.

  Be aggressive.

  The thought floats in front of Don. He sees it and scowls, catching himself. He knows that the moment he has to tell himself to be aggressive, he is no longer capable of doing so. That voice is passive, meek.

  Only one person is going to throw this pitch, he reminds himself.

  Either that pussy—

  Or this fucking guy here.

  He peers into Daulton’s squat for the sign, tugs on the brim of his hat, slams the ball into his glove.

  So who’s gonna throw it?

  As he rocks back and extends his arms overhead, the crowd roars to life. And up in the nosebleed seats of that sea of maroon-and-powder-blue-clad Phillies fans, I sit watching with my father, an eight-year-old with a squeaky voice and buck teeth whose biggest dream is to meet the man on the mound.

  Twenty-six years later in a zoo over a thousand miles away, that dream will come true.

  * * *

  *

  Expectations are dangerous, I remind myself as I drive down I-75 between Sarasota and Naples.

  For the first five thousand miles of the journey, I’ve managed to maintain professional distance, working my way into the lives and psyches of the Wax Packers while remaining objective. But with Don Carman, my idol of idols, the eight-year-old inside is winning. I have always wondered why Don stood out so much from the rest of the underdog players I liked. His name didn’t have any Fs in it, and other than playing for the Phillies, there was nothing else obvious to distinguish him. But my feelings were involuntary—I just liked him.

  I’m sweating even with the air-conditioning blasting my face. The parched mountains and brown plateaus of the western United States, all I saw for days at a time just a week ago, are now a distant memory. The pancake-flat landscape of southern Florida stretches around me, row after row of tropical pines and palms flanked by mangroves at the shore, their tentacle-like roots breaking the surface of the water. This state is predictable and green and sticky.2

  One of my goals as a kid was to collect all of Don’s baseball cards, which I displayed at the front of my baseball card album. In the pre-internet age, this meant scouring lists of cards published in hobby books and then pleading with my mom to drive me to dealers’ shops in their parents’ garages or basements to spend my allowance. Too sweet to say no, my mom would stand by while she watched her squeaky-voiced son haggle with man-children wearing tank tops. But again, having Don’s cards still wasn’t enough. For my hero, I wanted to do something truly special: send him a birthday card.

  My mom drove me to the Greenville Pharmacy, where I selected a Hallmark card with the image of a sailboat basking in a magnificent sunset and the following message inside: “Wishing you smooth sailing all year long.” Dissatisfied, I grabbed a blue pen, crossed out the word “sailing,” replaced it with “pitching,” and then sat back beaming, admiring my own cleverness. I enclosed one of his baseball cards to sign, composed a personal message explaining exactly why I considered him THE GREATEST PITCHER IN THE WORLD, and took out my copy of Sport Americana Baseball Address List, No. 5, a listing of the home addresses of every player to ever play Major League baseball (yes, this exists). I copied Don’s home address onto the envelope, slapped a twenty-five-cent stamp in the corner, and tried to time the mail so the card would arrive exactly on his birthday. And then I waited.

  I’m still waiting.

  Puberty ensued, my baseball cards got boxed up, and I returned from college one summer to find my bedroom converted into a guest room painted yellow (yellow!).

  Snapping myself back to the present, I rearrange the vents of the Accord, hoping to somehow channel the air even more directly in my face. A few minutes later, I reach the outskirts of Naples, now home to Don Carman.

  This is not the Naples that I expected.

  During the Florida land grab of the late 1880s, Walter Haldeman, founder of the Louisville Courier-Journal, led a group of Kentucky businessmen to establish the town of Naples, naming it for its similar climate to the famous Italian city. A six-hundred-foot pier, hotel, and general store were constructed for the town of 80, but more than forty years later, the population had only grown to 390. While the posh Naples Hotel was a retreat for such celebrities as Greta Garbo and Gary Cooper, the town didn’t flourish until the army arrived during World War II and spurred development. Today the population hovers around twenty-one thousand.

  Modern-day Naples is a symbol of the nouveau riche, a carefully manufactured paradise of high-rise condos and beachside excess inhabited by one of the most homogeneous populations I’ve ever seen—not just white, but white and old. Other than the similarity in complexion, you couldn’t find a place more different from the sparse prairie of Don’s hometown of Camargo.

  Right now, though, all I see are strip malls and swampland. I exit the interstate and pull into a worn motel called the Fairways Inn. The sky is already dark and heavy overhead, foreshadowing the daily late afternoon downpour in southern Florida, when the humidity finally snaps and the heavens open. The lobby is stuffed with colorful brochures for the kitschiest of activities—airboat tours and go-karts—and the guest rooms are arranged on a single level amid gardens of exotic plants. A shriveled woman with dyed blond hair and corrugated skin checks me in, and I walk past a group of guys in their early twenties in the courtyard, the scent of fresh cannabis wafting by.

  Once in my white-tile-floor room, I grab the remote control and turn on the air-conditioning unit mounted in the wall. I hear the rain arriving in force just outside the door, a quick crescendo of drops pummeling the lush vegetation, the kind of sudden onslaught that neve
r happens back in Oakland. I rub my feet together like a cricket under the dry cover of my bedsheets and open my Tinder account, craving a distraction. I swipe right to several profiles and a minute later match with Sophia, thirty-one, a brunette with close-set eyes and light freckles wearing an expression of soft determination in her profile picture. We begin texting.

  Brad: “Yes!”

  Sophia: “You stole my line.” Cookie emoji.

  Brad: “Haha. I got a cookie! This is my first time in Naples.”

  Sophia: “Ugh! A tourist?! I need my cookie back.”

  Brad: “Not quite. I am here to research a book I’m writing. It’s about tracking down all the players in a single pack of 1986 baseball cards. One of them lives here.”

  Sophia: “Oh my god. I’m in love with you.”

  We go on speaking Millennial for the next hour, discussing her career as a trainer for executive assistants, our shared affection for the movie Love, Actually, and our mutual interest in yoga. We make tentative plans to go to her favorite yoga studio tomorrow afternoon after I’m finished meeting with Don at the Naples Zoo. He’s my childhood hero, and what place better evokes childhood than the zoo?

  I lie on the bed in my underwear and stare at the wall in the dark, wondering if I’m hungry enough to get dressed and go out for a late bite to eat, then turn on my side and start imagining how the meeting with Don will go. How do I possibly prioritize what to ask? I toss and turn, mentally annotating my checklist of questions, then finally get so frustrated that I spring out of bed and hit the light switch, grabbing my spiral notebook and writing out a series of questions that I know I need to ask.

  At the top of the list: Did you ever get my birthday card?

  * * *

  *

  Don Carman is very earnestly trying to explain his job as a sports psychologist to me. And I’m very earnestly failing to understand.

  The giraffe a few yards behind him wraps its eighteen-inch purple tongue around a leaf of romaine lettuce offered by a little boy, who squeals and looks back to his parents for approval. The zoo’s website points out that the lettuce comes from a local fine foods vendor named Wynn’s Market.

  In Naples, even the giraffes eat well.

  Tilting its triangular head in our direction, the giraffe beams with that slightly amused expression that giraffes seem to have permanently stuck on their faces. His ears rotate toward us.

  “Almost every team has a sports psychologist now. But players never want to talk to them,” Don says.

  He’s wearing a white T-shirt that says “Escape Travel Live” and a pair of brown striped shorts. The Florida sun has left his face and neck permanently flushed, and his hairline, already visibly receding in baseball cards from twenty-five years ago, seems to have miraculously stopped its retreat, frozen in a peninsular shape. He sports a neatly trimmed gray goatee and at fifty-five is handsome, with small wrinkles around his eyes.

  I scribble furiously into my notebook, trying desperately to ignore the safari enveloping us.

  He goes on: “And that’s because the psychologists have to report to the general manager and the owners. If a player is about to go into free agency or arbitration and there are millions of dollars on the line, the team wants to know if you’re vulnerable, if you’ve got a drug problem, something else going on. And do you think a player is going to volunteer that?”

  He pauses, then answers his own question: “I don’t think so.”

  Baseball has always been the most mental game simply because there’s so much time to think. Each pitch is followed by a twenty- to thirty-second gap in which the brain can betray the body in dozens of different ways, while sports with more continuous action, like basketball and hockey, rely more on pure instinct. Until fairly recently, mental troubles were treated with a simple dismissive prescription: “Get over it.” But as baseball’s wealth grew from big to obscene, executives began seeing the importance of players’ psyches and their direct correlation with performance.

  Nineteen years after he threw his last pitch, Don now has one of the most fascinating and unusual jobs in all of baseball. He is one of two psychologists on staff for Scott Boras, the agent to the stars, the same Scott Boras who helped Alex Rodriguez sign a ten-year, $252 million contract back in 2000, at the time the biggest contract in the history of sports. Boras runs his own secretive miniempire out of an office in Newport Beach, California, employing not only psychologists but also an MIT-trained economist and a former NASA engineer. Decades ago, before he was accused by owners and fans alike of being Satan’s money-hoarding spawn, Boras was a hungry young sports agent looking to build a client base. He liked what he saw in Don and offered his services. Now they’ve switched places, with Boras as the boss.

  Players will talk to Don because he works for their agent, not for their employer. During the baseball season, Don is always on call. When one of Boras’s clients goes into a slump, Don bolts to the airport and catches a flight to whatever Major League city the player is in for some in situ treatment.

  “Is a lot of what you talk about with players baseball specific? Or is a lot of it more general psychology?” I ask.

  “I would say it’s only 20 percent baseball.”

  His eyes shift to a point behind me.

  “Trying to get that last tidbit,” he says, motioning toward the giraffe extending its tongue for the last scrap of lettuce.

  Don has perfected the art of watching and listening. Like the giraffe, he tilts his head but keeps his blue eyes rapt and intent, releasing an occasional lopsided grin that seems slightly bashful. His long, trim frame is athletic, the product of years of intense martial arts training and discipline. He and Hall of Fame pitcher Steve Carlton were among the few Phillies players willing to endure conditioning guru Gus Hoefling’s Northern Sil Lum kung fu program. Every morning at nine, he drove to the back room of the clubhouse at Veterans Stadium to work with Gus, Steve, and an occasional curious teammate. Most wanted nothing to do with it.

  “[John] Kruk would come back with a drink, sit down, and make fun of us,” he says, referring to the Phillies’ rotund prankster. Although almost all players now have rigorous training regimens, in the 1980s it was exceptional.

  “Kent Tekulve would smoke cigarettes in the bullpen while warming up. He would actually take a puff of a cigarette, put it down on the corner of the rubber, throw a pitch, pick it up, and take another drag,” Don says.

  A typical workout with Gus included twenty-five fingertip push-ups followed by twenty-five sit-ups, then twenty push-ups and twenty sit-ups, dropping by sets of five at a time and finishing with a set of one-armed push-ups. Don would then sit with his legs elevated and outstretched and do sit-ups while a partner (often Carlton) used his legs to try and push Don’s knees together, forcing him to resist. He spent the next fifteen minutes in a constant squat as he shuffled across the room, practicing punches and other techniques while Gus coached and kicked his legs out if his form got sloppy. And that was just the warm-up.

  Don loved every second of the three-hour torture sessions. He thrived on that intensity, the chance to focus every cell on whatever was right in front of him. He attributes making the big leagues to that capacity to be entirely present; although many others had more talent, they didn’t have his drive. Even now, he works the same way.

  “When I’m meeting with someone, often it will go for two hours, and it will feel like ten minutes. And if we happen to be in a restaurant, I’ll have to tip double for not opening up the table.”

  We leave behind the giraffes and head toward the open-air tables outside the gift shop. Grabbing some bottled waters and prepackaged sandwiches, we sit down across from each other next to the macaws and the live animal theater stage.

  Although I had read about Don being a bit different, I’m beginning to see what an original thinker he is.

  As a player, he grew so weary of hearing himself recite the same old clichés to sportswriters that one day he simply posted a list of thirty-seven
canned responses to their questions in his locker and asked them to pick their favorite for that day’s sound bite.

  I’m just glad to be here. I just want to help the club any way I can.

  If we stay healthy, we should be right there.

  And my favorite: I don’t get paid to hit.

  (Don was an abysmal hitter, even by pitcher standards. He hit .057 in 209 career at bats.)

  “What is it like to now be on the other side, working with players?” I ask.

  “Players are impatient, like children,” he explains, two multicolored bracelets sliding around his right wrist. “They need a hit today. Not tomorrow or in three weeks. They need a quick fix. And I know that. They’ll call me and just say, ‘Tell me something good.’ I know what that means. It means I’m confused, I’m not sure about my approach, and I have anxiety.”

  For most of his life, Don used aggression to fight anxiety. So when today’s superstars (Bryce Harper and Stephen Strasburg are among Boras’s clients) come calling with insecurities of their own, he knows how to help them fight.

  “Growing up, I was on high alert at all times, as if something was about to go wrong. It was a terrible way to live.”

  The sun is in full force, beating down on the crowns of our heads, the muggy air clinging to our bare arms and legs. I wipe the sweat from my forehead. I want to know more about what made his childhood so difficult but don’t want to press him just yet.

  “My intensity came out of fear, fear of not making it, fear of having to go back to Oklahoma, which was the biggest fear of my life,” he says.

  He goes on: “Baseball was just all I could do. I didn’t hate it, but if I had grown up in a place where there was ice hockey, I would have been a hockey player. When I played I would stand on the top step of the dugout and see thirty-five thousand people there and just shake my head. I didn’t get it.”