Beyond Belief (21 page)

On January 17, 2006, three and a half months after I showed up at Granny’s doorstep, I left Raleigh and headed for Tampa, to take a shot at resuming my baseball career.

Piece by piece.

Before I left, I wrote a letter to Granny, sealed it in an envelope, and left it on the kitchen table. I hugged her and thanked her, and I told her I would never forget what she did for me.

In the letter, I wrote:

People talk about tough love, but you showed me true love.

Nobody could say I was spoiled. At the Winning Inning, I slept on an air mattress in an old upstairs office formerly used by some long-gone Phillies manager. I showered in an old clubhouse and hung my clothes in an open locker. I did not feel like a pampered athlete.

Every day I cleaned toilets and mopped floors and raked the fields. Roy and Randy kept an eye on me, but they gave me my space. I did my work throughout the day to earn time in the batting cage in the evening. I worked out and ran and tested my body for the first time since I got clean.

There were worries about how I would handle my freedom — or, more like semifreedom — this time around. My parents were worried, Katie was worried. Their worries were understandable, but I left with a newfound confidence and calm. I wasn’t venturing back into the world alone this time; I had God on my side, guiding me to make the right decisions. I began every day with a prayer asking for the strength to make that day positive, to end the day as a better man, husband, and father than I was when I woke up.

Roy and Randy ran after-school camps and other group activities for kids in the area. It was part of their mission, using baseball as their ministry. This became one of my favorite things about the place. Being around the little kids reignited my love for baseball and made me realize why I had to give myself another chance to get back into the game. I saw them and I saw myself, a kid who lived for the game and had no worries. I saw myself at a time when I didn’t have bad thoughts, when my life was simpler and baseball was fun and easy and worry-free.

There was one boy in particular, a twelve-year-old named Julius, who lived across the street in a tough neighborhood with his great-grandmother. We had very little in common — Julius was a street-smart black kid who had seen more than his share of hardship — but we bonded over baseball.

Julius had only been playing baseball for a year or two at this point, and he came to the Winning Inning almost every day after school to hit and work out. He played on one of the teams sponsored by the facility, and he could really play.

Baseball just happened to be the opportunity presented to Julius. Roy and Randy made it available to him, and it was a safe place for him to spend the afternoon. They made sure he brought his schoolwork, and they gave him chores to teach him responsibility.

Julius showed his gratitude on the field. He played with abandon, loving every minute of it. I would watch him and just smile, seeing the game for the first time again as I watched him run around like I used to, treating the diamond as his own playground.

My life probably looked pretty good to him. I was living in a clubhouse, working for the right to play. Most twelve-year-olds who live in an environment where people are selling drugs off their apartment stoop would think this was the life.

Julius started coming to our Tuesday night Bible study, and that’s where he learned a little bit of my story. He started looking up to me, and there were many times when I was hitting in the cage, thinking I was all alone, only to turn around and see Julius’s wide smile and adoring eyes staring at me. Usually he was shaking his head, amazed at the speed and sound of the ball coming off my bat.

He didn’t judge me or question me. I told him I had made mistakes, and I told him he didn’t have to give in to the same temptations that got me. His life was hard, and there were obstacles that I didn’t face, but I tried to tell him that God and baseball were two pretty good ways to keep himself out of trouble.

He listened to what I had to say, and he watched everything I did. I can’t explain how much this meant to me at this stage of my recovery. After so many years of disappointing people, of trying and failing, seeing someone respond to my ability like this was yet another sign that I was back on track. I’ve always fed off the response I’ve gotten from the way I swing the bat, but his smile and look of wonderment was something I felt in my soul. When I saw Julius, I saw Jesus working through him.

More than just about anything, this strengthened my resolve to get back into the game. It reinforced the idea that I was doing the right thing, in the right place. I remembered Katie’s words, way back when hope was hard to find.
You’re going to be back playing baseball. Josh, there’s a bigger plan for you. When you come back, it’s going to be about more than baseball.
If I had any doubts, this erased them. I was sent here to use baseball as a platform for something bigger. This was my calling.

One night at the Winning Inning I had a dream that I was competing in the Home Run Derby at the All-Star Game. At this stage of my recovery, this was a pretty far-out dream. I was hitting well and everybody was cheering, but I wasn’t keeping count of how many I hit. I couldn’t place the stadium or the pitcher, but when it was over someone called me over toward the dugout, where I stood to be interviewed by a female television reporter. I woke up on my air mattress in the old manager’s office feeling happy and wondering, How many home runs did I hit? Did I win? I didn’t know how many, and I didn’t know whether I won or lost. And I realized there was a reason: God doesn’t care about winning or losing. It’s not important; what’s important is to be there, and to use your gifts to the fullest potential.

Every year there’s a college baseball spring tournament at the Jack Russell complex. Teams from the cold-weather states come down to Florida to play some early season games and enjoy some decent weather. To me, this meant I had to get to work. I needed to help prepare the fields and the facility to host the tournament. Bullpen mounds, bathrooms, bleachers — everything had to be cleaned up and spruced up.

On the first day of the tournament, Penn State and Ohio State were on the field getting ready to play each other. I was walking around in my Timberland boots and cargo shorts, carrying a rake to get the bullpens in shape.

I was in the Penn State bullpen, watching their pitchers scuffle and goof around and generally waste time in the traditional way baseball players have been doing for more than a hundred years. They weren’t doing much; I think it was five or six hours before the game. We were talking back and forth, about not much of anything, when I noticed one of their catchers was standing there, in full gear.

I nodded toward him.

“Hey, can I throw a couple?”

They had no idea who I was. I was just a guy working on a field. They might have thought I’d be good for a laugh, so one of them said, “Why not?”

I had been throwing for a couple of weeks by this point, so I wasn’t in midseason form by any means. My arm, though, had been feeling pretty good.

I borrowed a glove and tossed a few to get loose. Then I backed up to the mound and told the catcher to get into his squat.

After two pitches, their eyes were wide and they were looking at me like I was something they’d never seen before. A few of them were sitting on the bench to the side of the mound, where the ball whizzed by them. “I can hear that thing,” one of them said.

Timberland boots, cargo shorts — to them, I was like the guy from
The Rookie
or something.

When I was finished, I tossed the ball to one of the guys and went back to my rake.

“Hey, can you come in and close for us today?” one of the guys asked.

“I wish I could,” I said. “You have no idea how much I wish I could.”

Katie and I were in constant contact while I was in Clearwater, and she decided to leave the girls with her parents and make a trip down to see me. Circumstances had kept us apart physically, but I felt we were growing closer together from a distance. Now it was time for us to give our reconciliation a chance to work in person.

The first day she arrived was the day she watched me take batting practice for the first time. She had never seen me compete, ever, and her reaction — “If I had known you were throwing away
that
kind of talent, I would have been so much angrier with you” — is something we still laugh about.

The time we spent away gave us each time to reflect and take stock of our relationship. We were committed to making it work, and from the moment we were together in Clearwater it felt as if none of those bad times ever happened.

Katie made a promise not to throw my past back at me, and she kept it.

I made a promise to be positive every day, to wake up every morning intent on making myself a better husband, father, and man of faith. I don’t know whether I succeeded every day, but I certainly tried.

I was back to 235 pounds, which meant I had regained fifty pounds in less than three months. The ball was jumping off my bat, just like the old days, and I had a newfound appreciation for the game that I had given up hope of recapturing.

I was at peace. So much forgiveness had come my way, and so much mercy. I felt free to pursue my dreams once again, this time under vastly different circumstances. The expectations of being the next big thing had gone away. I had receded from the public consciousness, and any success from this point forward would be a surprise to everybody but me.

This was beginning to feel like a miracle. The cravings still hit me occasionally, but I adopted an eight-second rule when it came to bad thoughts. In recovery, I had been taught that any thought that stays in your mind for more than eight seconds can result in action. So whenever those thoughts crept into my mind, I started counting and erased the thought before I reached eight.

The more I played, the more confident I got. I was continually amazed by my body’s ability to bounce back, and I stopped trying to come up with explanations. Logic played no part in any of this, and I started to shrug and say, “It’s a God thing,” whenever someone asked. It was the only answer I knew.

I started to believe I could do this. The game was back inside me, and I needed to make a statement to Major League Baseball that I was serious about my commitment to the game. I needed them to take notice of me and understand I was more than a name on the suspended list.

But if I couldn’t play in the minor leagues, what were my options? There was really only one — independent-league baseball. These are teams unaffiliated with big-league organizations, and they are traditionally last-chance outposts for players trying to hang on to their dreams.

Richard Davis, my friend from my days in Charleston in 2000, had become a part owner of an independent team called the Brockton Rox, near Boston. He was a successful real-estate man who cohosted the A&E television show
Flip This House.
Richard suggested I try to get the Devil Rays and Major League Baseball to sign off on my playing for his team, since we figured the suspension applied only to teams officially under the MLB umbrella.

Richard and Steve Reed, my business manager, who was now working as my de facto agent, thought it would be worth a shot to go up there and play. At the very least, it would show the people in the commissioner’s office that I was serious about resuming my career and staying clean.

This was May 2006, and I had been clean for seven months, the longest stretch of sobriety I had achieved since I started using back in early 2002. I had owned up to my mistakes and taken positive steps to become a man of faith and honor.

The only thing missing, it seemed to me, was the ability to go back out on the field and earn a living at the game I was born to play. As I’ve said a million times, baseball was really the only thing I’ve ever been really, really good at doing. I was ready for the game to come back into my life full-time. In fact, I needed it.

Katie and I made the decision: We would take the kids and move up there. I could work out in a batting cage in a town called Wrentham and wait for Major League Baseball to rule on my appeal. It was unclear whether my suspension applied to independent-league teams, but I wanted to go through the proper channels. The last thing I needed was to be seen as a renegade.

Knowing this was a big step, one that could create heartbreak if it didn’t work out, Katie and I prayed on our decision. In the end, we felt it was a chance worth taking, and I hoped my willingness to move my family up there for a chance to play again would emphasize my dedication to the game.

The next step was to convince the decision-makers that I was a changed man. The Devil Rays wrote a letter to Commissioner Bud Selig. My father-in-law, Big Daddy, had written two letters to Selig and received polite replies each time. He wrote another letter in support of me.

Most important, Dr. Brodie wrote a letter to Selig recommending I be reinstated by MLB to pursue my career. He wrote that a return to the game could go a long way toward helping my recovery.

The final letter had to come from me. I knew everything I wanted to say, but I needed to organize my thoughts and make sure I said everything the right way. This felt like a monumental task, but it got easier when I made a decision: I would write it from the heart.

I sat down and wrote about where I’d been and where I was now, and how my life changed when I didn’t have baseball. I took responsibility for my failings and asked only for a chance. I told them I truly believed everything that happened to me was part of a bigger plan, and now the plan called for me to return to the game.

I wrote that baseball was the third and final piece to my recovery, behind God and family. If I could only return to the game, if I could only get a chance to make up for the sin of denying myself and others the benefit of my talent, I could complete this circle.

We were asking MLB to bend the rules for me. By the letter of the law, I should have remained suspended and on the restricted list through the end of the 2006 season. But I felt my circumstances were extraordinary, and I was willing to play independent-league baseball for next to nothing to see if I could get back on the field.