Inside Baseball: The Best of Tom Verducci (38 page)

In his five days as a major leaguer, the author saw the splendors of baseball—
and its hard reality—from the best perspective: inside the game

S
TANDING IN LEFTFIELD DURING A MAJOR LEAGUE GAME—I
am
playing
leftfield—heightens my very sense of being. There is a vibrancy to the colors and sensations around me that, even as I stand there, I am cataloging in my most secure vault of memory. I can feel the tips of my metal spikes knifing between blades of grass and into the soft, moist earth. I feel the fit and drape of my uniform, a
major league
uniform, my amazing technicolor dreamcoat. Gray pants, belted tightly, black-mesh jersey with TORONTO in metallic silver above the stylized Blue Jays logo on the left breast and a shimmering silver number 2 on my back. Never can I remember the sky bluer, the grass greener, the sun brighter.

It is not an out-of-body experience but rather its opposite: a saturation of sensations. With a change in perspective, the familiar becomes intensely intimate, like actually standing on the blue carpet of the Oval Office or feeling the floorboards of the Carnegie Hall stage beneath your feet or leaving footprints upon the Sea of Tranquility.

It is also a little like transporting dynamite on your person. A feeling of power, yes, but with a constant undercurrent of danger, especially knowing that Blue Jays first baseman Eric Hinske, who keeps fouling off pitches like a finicky shopper picking through unripe fruit, could at any moment send a curving line drive screaming my way or, worse, loft a fiendish high fly into that bright, cloudless sky and cruel cross-field wind, leaving me to look as if I were chasing a dollar bill dropped from a helicopter.

This is where the long march of a baseball season begins. A team will play upward of 200 games before the curtain falls on the World Series. This is the first for Toronto, an intrasquad game. About 2,000 fans—nearly all of whom, to my dismay as I try to track pitches from leftfield, are wearing gleaming white shirts—ring the backstop of Field 2 at the Bobby Mattick Training Center in Dunedin, Fla., drawn, after a winter of scraping snow shovels against the driveway, by those two lovely words: GAME TODAY.

I am a sportswriter, and sportswriters belong on the other side of the fence with the other unchosen. So why in the name of Kafka is a sportswriter playing leftfield for the Blue Jays? Maybe Kafka, not always the surrealist, can explain. On Oct. 18, 1921, three years before he died at age 40, Kafka cracked open his diary and wrote this entry: “Life’s splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off…. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come.”

I have come to Dunedin to summon it. Beginning with the team’s first full-squad workout on Feb. 25, I have spent five days as a full-fledged player, in spirit and in uniform—attending every private meeting, running every sprint, participating in every live batting-practice session, sharing every clubhouse joke. “The full metal jacket,” as manager John Gibbons promised me.

My most modest goals were to make it through five days with my bats and my hamstrings intact. My greater goals were to learn about the game up close, in the first person rather than in the third, about how spring training begins to lay the mortar for the sacred brotherhood of teammates—and about myself.

Five days a Jay, standing there with the vastness of leftfield my responsibility, my head is crammed with newfound knowledge. I’ve heard the ferocious hum of a 95-mph fastball, taken more than 100 swings a day, been hit by a pitch and heard grown men admonished for not washing their hands after using the bathroom.

Now it is about to end. I will get one at bat in this intrasquad game. One chance at splendor.

“RED SOX, Yankees … Red Sox, Yankees … I don’t care about the Red Sox and Yankees,” general manager J.P. Ricciardi says. “We have to take care of ourselves. This is the most important year in the four years I’ve been here. This is your chance, from right now, to decide what kind of team you want to be.”

Ricciardi is addressing his troops in a classroom that is down a hallway from the main clubhouse. Like schoolkids the players fill the desks located in the back of the room but leave most of the ones up front unoccupied. This is what is known as the annual orientation meeting, ostensibly to introduce the training, coaching and support staff—and this year one embedded reporter—but also for the manager and general manager to set the tone for the season.

The Blue Jays are a blank slate. After a surprise third-place finish with 86 wins in 2003, Toronto sank to the basement in the American League East last year, losing 94 games. The Jays are Liechtenstein in a division with Cold War superpowers New York and Boston. Toronto’s best player, first baseman Carlos Delgado, signed with Florida as a free agent. In front of Ricciardi and Gibbons sit only four players who have made an All-Star team, and only one who has hit 30 home runs, centerfielder Vernon Wells. As if to acknowledge his increased importance to the club, Wells is the one player who dares to sit front and center, where he’s casually munching an apple.

“I like this team,” Gibbons tells his players. “I like our starting pitching. We have good arms in the bullpen. Our defense is excellent. And we have a lot of very good hitters. What we need to concentrate on is being an aggressive team, being a very good situational hitting team and cutting down on strikeouts. Some people will say this team will not hit a lot of home runs. You never know how that will play out. But we’re going to be aggressive on the bases.”

Trainer George Poulis also addresses the team. He mentions that he noticed “a couple of guys the other day use the toilet, get up and leave without washing their hands. Now you go to the fruit bowl, you touch some grapes, not taking all of them, and the next guy comes in, takes that grape you touched and puts it in his mouth. And what’s on that grape? Fecal matter. That’s how you spread virus and bacteria.”

There is nervous schoolboy laughter in the room.

“V-Dub,” catcher Gregg Zaun calls to Wells, “I think someone touched that apple.”

When the meeting ends, the infielders and pitchers leave for Field 2 to work on bunt defense. I join the outfielders in the four covered batting cages for soft toss, a hitting drill in which a coach tosses baseballs to the hitter from behind a protective screen about 20 feet from home plate.

I work with Mike Barnett, 46, who has the rare distinction of being a big league hitting coach without ever having played a day of professional baseball. Barnett’s career as a catcher ended in 1978 when he blew out his shoulder at Ohio University. So one day soon after, just to stay in baseball, he walked into the offices of the Pirates’ Triple A team in Columbus, Ohio, his hometown, and asked for a job as a bullpen catcher. He got it. He worked his way through various college and minor league coaching stops until the Blue Jays hired him to be their hitting coach in 2002. “I know every day how fortunate I am to be doing what I’m doing,” he says.

The art of hitting is the ability to cast aside the preponderance of failure endemic to the task. Only hitters and weather forecasters can be wrong so often and still keep their jobs. To that end a hitting coach is really a confidence coach. He must be vigilantly optimistic. But even in this fraternity of positive thinkers, Barnett stands out. The joke among the front office staff is that Barnett is so sunny that any day they expect him to say, “You know, I think Verducci has a chance to help us ….”

Barnett is not, however, a miracle worker. I am 44 years old. Excluding handfuls of pickup games involving other sportswriters, I have not faced live pitching in more than 23 years, since a career at Penn State spent almost entirely as an outfielder on the practice squad. I have not hit with a wooden bat since I was 10, and that one was held together with nails and electrical tape. Not wanting to pretend to be something I wasn’t, I didn’t visit a batting cage or even swing a bat to prepare for this adventure.

Barnett makes some quick changes that click immediately: He lowers my hands, changes my swing path to a more downward angle and shows me how to shift my weight through the swing for a more balanced follow-through. I fall in love with the solid feel and thwack of hard maple upon a new baseball. Equipment manager Jeff Ross has issued me two bats, one maple and one traditional ash. The maple is noticeably harder.

“A lot of guys who use maple won’t use it early in spring training,” outfielder Reed Johnson tells me. “It doesn’t break as easily, and early on you tend to get jammed more. Guys would rather just break their bat and not feel the pain.”

Here it is, first day of camp, and we’re supposed to hit live pitching next. That’s hard enough after five months off, never mind 23 years.

“Ten, 15 years ago, we’d hit off coaches or machines for five to seven days first,” says Merv Rettenmund, the organization’s roving minor league hitting instructor. “But it’s not the same as live pitching. So you might as well just dive in and get started.”

Rain, heaven-sent, forces a change in plans. Pitchers will throw in the indoor cages, where the light is too dim to allow hitters to do anything but stand in at the plate and track the ball.

I step in against righthander Roy Halladay, the 2003 Cy Young Award winner, who is 6′6″, 225 pounds and looks capable of throwing a pitch through the cinder block wall behind the cage. I immediately realize the utter inadequacy of television to capture the power of a major league pitch. Halladay’s fastball is angry, announcing its indignation with an audible hum that grows frighteningly loud as it approaches. His slider is even more evil because it presents itself in the clothing of a fastball but then, like a ball rolling down the street and falling into an open manhole, drops out of sight, down and away. His curveball bends more than an election-year politician.

I am so impressed with his stuff—it is
February
—that I will ask him later how close he is to season-ready velocity. Halladay, 27, tells me he’s “just about there right now,” having thrown off a mound six times before camp opened. Everyone, it seems, hits the ground running these days.

Miguel Batista, 34, follows Halladay on the mound. I am in a group with fellow outfielders Wells, Johnson and Frank Catalanotto, but no one moves to step in. Batista is still waiting when Wells motions to me and says, “Go ahead.” I jump in, to the accompaniment of snickers.

It will not be until the next day that Wells tells me Batista hit three players in the head in spring training last year. So I am the royal taster. The three outfielders want me in there to gauge Batista’s control. He has about eight varieties of pitches, and all of them move like a rabbit flushed out of a bush. He throws me one pitch that I swear breaks two ways—first left, then right—like a double-breaker putt in golf, only at about 90 mph.

I mention this to the catcher, Ken Huckaby, who laughs and says, “He’s filthy. I faced him three times in spring training last year. Struck me out three times on a total of nine pitches.”

I don’t know how anyone hits Batista, and his teammates’ apprehension indicates how uncomfortable he makes hitters. But Batista was 10–13 with a pedestrian 4.80 ERA last year. His gift for making a baseball dance is also his curse. He tends to get careless with his vast repertoire, such as starting weak hitters with errant sliders instead of pumping in a first-strike fastball.

Batista throws me one pitch on which, halfway to the plate, I can see a dot surrounded by spinning seams. Slider! I have cracked its code by reading the telltale dot. Then I realize something: The ball was already halfway to the plate by the time I decoded it, probably too late to do anything with it. Just by tracking pitches from Halladay, Batista, Scott Schoeneweis and Dave Bush, I have come to understand that there is a race between the ball and my mind, and the ball is winning. By the time I process speed, spin, location and probable path and decide whether to swing or not, it is too late. The ball is past me.

Later we face pitches thrown by coaches from about 50 feet away, or what is called dead-arm BP. The cages become a shooting gallery. As heavy rain pounds the metal roof, all four cages crackle with one solid
thwack
after another. It is so loud that you have to raise your voice to be heard. Coaches take cover behind a protective screen after each pitch as balls whiz past them like shots at a firing range, packing the same deadly force.

During the rainstorm a group of infielders and outfielders huddles in a small dugout nearby while third base coach Brian Butterfield, with a preacher’s passion, delivers a sermon on baserunning.

“Make your own legacy,” he tells us. “We will always slide into second base. Always. Don’t even make that early peel-off an option with two outs. And you know that saying, Don’t make the first or third out at third base? Be aware of it, but don’t be a prisoner of it. If you get thrown out, that’s O.K. Now if it happens again and again, then maybe we have to talk about pulling in the reins. But we’re going to be one of the best two-base teams in baseball. Make it a priority.”

WHEN BUTTERFIELD is finished, it is still raining too hard to go back to the clubhouse or the batting cages. So, like a bunch of Little Leaguers waiting for the rain to stop, we pass the time telling jokes and needling one another. Second baseman Orlando Hudson, who lovingly refers to 5′8″ infielder Frank Menechino as “Mini-Me,” is the team’s champion trash talker. Hudson, with Wells and Catalanotto, is considering which players should be allowed to locker near them in the preferred corner of the clubhouse in Toronto. This is serious stuff. The layout of the locker room is like a Monopoly board; some neighborhoods have more intrinsic value than others. Whoever joins those three will gain status, moving in among the tribal leaders.

Johnson, 28, with two years of big league service, wants in on the prime property. He is told he must submit a written application explaining why he is worthy and including a proposed name for the neighborhood. “You want in the hood,” Hudson says, “you’ve got to come up with a name.”