Beyond Belief (5 page)

By this time, Boras was already known as the ultimate baseball super-agent. He had already caused some teams to recoil every time they saw a player represented by him, and that was one of the reasons we didn’t choose him. From the beginning, my daddy told the agents and the teams that we weren’t looking to fleece anybody.

“We don’t want to take anybody to the cleaners,” my daddy said whenever he was asked.

We knew the signing bonus for the first or second pick was going to be more than enough to last us for a long, long time. The most important thing was to get me signed for a fair amount of money and get me started as quickly as possible on my pro career. That was exactly what the Devil Rays wanted to hear.

About a week after the draft I received a letter from Boras. In it, he outlined the reasons why I should have signed with him. I didn’t think much about it at the time, but it was probably a good business move for him to keep his name alive in my mind in case something didn’t work out and I found myself shopping for a new agent.

As we got closer to the June 2 draft, the talk of the number-one pick narrowed to the two Joshes: me, and a hard-throwing right-handed high school pitcher from Houston named Josh Beckett. The Devil Rays would pick one Josh first, and the Marlins would follow by picking the other Josh.

About a week before the draft, it became clear I would be drafted as an outfielder. There was still some room for me to demand to pitch, if that was my choice, but I wanted to play every day and the two teams decided I was more valuable playing every day than I would be pitching every fifth day. As much as I enjoyed pitching, I agreed completely.

There hadn’t been a high school position player taken with the number-one pick since Alex Rodriguez was drafted by the Seattle Mariners in 1993. The consensus among scouts who had seen us both was that I was a better high school player. Some of those scouts — again, people not naturally given to hyperbole — openly stated that I was the best high school player anybody had ever seen.

And three days before the draft, I got a call from Devil Rays’ scout Mark McKnight. As the Devil Rays’ area scout for North Carolina, he had become a fixture around my high school games. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience for an area scout to be in position to recommend a player to be the top pick in the draft, and by the time the week of the draft arrived, McKnight probably knew more about me than I did.

After I came to the phone — with so many people calling, I made it a point not to answer the phone during this stretch — McKnight said, “Josh, I’m calling to let you know we’ve made our decision. We’re going to pick you number one in the draft.”

This wasn’t completely unexpected, but when he said the words all I could think to say was, “Wow.” I thanked him and hung up, then told my parents the news. There wasn’t a huge celebration, just some hugs and handshakes and congratulations. I didn’t know how I would react if that dream came true, and when it did I wasn’t prepared for how humbling it was. Of all the amateur players in the country, all the high school and junior college and college players, I was going to be the first player taken in the draft.

I kept lining all those players up in my head, endless rows of uniforms and equipment stretching to the horizon. And me, a kid from a corner of North Carolina, coming from a high school with no special tradition of baseball, a kid who learned the game from a father who never played baseball in high school, was about to have his name announced first on the morning of the 1999 baseball draft.

Being the guy picked “ one-one” — first player, first round — meant I would be scrutinized even more, by a far greater number of people. More than any other player in the draft, I would be subject to the instant analysis of my performance. I would be either a great pick or a bust, and it wouldn’t take long for the reviews to start coming in. I would carry a label with me forever, to the point where it seemed to affix itself to me like another first name: former number-one pick Josh Hamilton.

It was understood that being one-one came with a certain responsibility that extended far beyond draft day. It was my responsibility to dictate whether the label would become a source of pride, or a burden.

The Devil Rays did their homework. They scrutinized Josh Beckett just as thoroughly as they did me. They watched him pitch and spoke to his friends. They analyzed and assessed until they could predict when he would take a deep breath and when he would stand on the mound and stretch his neck. It wasn’t science, but they pretended it was.

My parents prepared for draft day — June 2 — by planning a party at our house. People from the community, eager to get involved in an event that would attract the attention of the national media, offered their help. Pepsi donated drinks; a local pizza place donated food; a local funeral home provided big canvas canopies — normally used to cover gravesites at funerals — so everyone would have a place to escape the sun.

This was the beginning of my life’s acceleration. Starting on this day, when the Devil Rays called my name in the morning, setting off a riot of cheers and laughter and hugs, my world became a blur.

I walked into the front yard and held my first press conference. The mood was happy and optimistic. When I was asked how I envisioned my career, I said, “I’m thinking three years in the minors, then fifteen years in the big leagues.” I paused for a moment and said, “Then I’ll have to wait five years to get into the Hall of Fame.”

Everyone laughed, even the reporters. It was a moment when anything and everything seemed possible, maybe even probable. Nothing seemed too outlandish, not even crazy talk of the Hall of Fame before I’d even seen a pitch in the minors.

Still, crazy as it sounded, I was confident and eager to get started. I wouldn’t have said those words if I didn’t think they would come true. At that moment, with the world at my feet, that was exactly the way I believed my career would progress.

The festivities ended in the early afternoon. Nearly all the newspaper reporters packed up their tape recorders and notebooks and drove off. The television people got back into their vans and went back to the stations. We started cleaning up, and as we were breaking down the funeral-home tents, the one television reporter who lingered longer than the others asked us if we needed his help.

“Well, there is one thing,” my daddy said, and I could tell right away he was about to launch into one of his practical jokes. “You see, the funeral home lent us these canopies to use for our party today, and when they delivered them I asked the director what we could do to pay him back. He thought for a minute and said, ‘Bring me back some business.’ And well, since you’re the only one left here, I guess it’s got to be you.”

The reporter had been listening so intently to my daddy’s story that it took a few seconds for him to realize my daddy was joking. Finally, he laughed and walked to his car with my daddy slapping him on the back the whole way.

When the yard was clear and the house empty, Jason and I jumped into the truck with our parents and went down to the high school to take some batting practice. Jason was home for leave from the Marines, and this seemed like the perfect way to celebrate the day. It was just like old times, the four of us doing what we loved to do.

There was a house beyond the center-field fence at the high school, out in the pine woods. A family with two young sons lived there, and sometimes they’d come out and watch games or watch us hit. After I had been hitting for a few minutes, the young dad walked down to the field with his two sons. They watched for a while, and when I was finished he said to me, “I just saw you on the news, and I didn’t expect you’d be out here tonight. But I can always tell when you’re hitting. It just sounds different inside my house when your bat hits the ball. After the first crack of the bat today, my boys said, ‘Josh is hitting.’ ”

In Houston, after being named the number-two pick in the country, Josh Beckett was given a Marlins cap to try on for the cameras. The cap was an adjustable-fit model, and as he worked to line up the holes to find the right fit, Beckett joked about the Marlins not being able to come up with a form-fit model.

In the
Raleigh News and Observer
the day after the draft, McKnight explained why the Devil Rays ended up picking me over Beckett. “I think character may have been the final determining factor,” he said. “You read so many bad things about professional athletes these days, but I don’t think you ever will about Josh.”

At the time, he got no argument.

The day after the draft my parents and I flew to Tampa to be introduced by the team to the media and fans. On June 4, two days after the draft, I signed my contract in the morning. In the afternoon, I suited up in a big-league uniform — green jersey, white pants — with my name and No. 22 on the back.

I dressed in an unused locker in a corner of the clubhouse, and I tried to stay cool about the whole deal. Most of the other Devil Rays filtered past and shook my hand, welcoming me to the club and wishing me luck. I stood in front of the mirror in the bathroom and tried not to linger too long. I looked good, though, and I felt even better.

I took batting practice with the team, and they put me in the same group with Jose Canseco and Fred McGriff. Almost immediately, Canseco started calling me “Thumper,” after the rabbit from Bambi. He saw my relatively skinny body — six-four and 190 pounds — and size-nineteen feet and decided I was the closest thing to “Thumper” in human form. After we’d taken a couple of rounds, he said, “Hey, Thumper, how about next round we have a home run derby, me and you?”

“Okay, sure,” I said, figuring I couldn’t say no and I really couldn’t lose by saying yes.

He went first and hit three balls out. When he was finished, he leaned on his bat and said, “Okay, Thumper, show me what you got.”

Surprisingly, I wasn’t nervous. I thought it was funny, and I knew there was no way a kid two weeks past his eighteenth birthday could disrupt Jose Canseco’s ego. So I smiled and nodded at Jose, respecting the distance of his shots, and proceeded to hit six homers in my next nine swings.

Six to three. Thumper wins.

Jose’s three shots went a lot farther than mine. He hit two into the area they call The Beach above the second deck. But I was just eighteen years old, you know, and unlike Jose, I was working with God-given eighteen-year-old muscles.

When I walked out of the cage, I didn’t say a word. And Canseco didn’t say a word.

There was a weird quiet for a couple of seconds before I noticed McGriff. He was standing next to Canseco smiling while Jose ignored him. McGriff laughed to break the silence and said, “Challenge him to another one, Jose. Come on, challenge him again.”

Canseco waved it off, like it was no big deal. I did the same, even though I was wishing I could tell everyone I knew what just happened.

Back in the clubhouse, as I changed out of the uniform and into my street clothes, Canseco approached me with a glossy folder in his hands. “Thumper, take a look at this,” he said. I took the folder and saw a photograph of a beautiful Florida house, with all the pertinent information. It was a real-estate portfolio for a monstrous estate.

I looked at Canseco, a little bewildered.

“I’m selling my house,” he said, completely serious. “You might want to take a look at it, see what you think.”

I thought, Oh, man, this guy’s something else.

In the span of three days, I’d gone from taking batting practice at Athens Drive High to being given the chance to buy Jose Canseco’s house. None of this seemed real.

Before the game started I threw out the ceremonial first pitch. I stood on the front of the mound, while my mom, my daddy, and Jason stood to the first-base side of the mound. Jason was home on leave from the Marines, and as I wound up to throw I shot him a glance and winked before I tossed the ball to the plate. He started busting up.

All things considered, it was pretty crazy stuff for someone who was still two days away from high school graduation.

But in a weird way, I felt like I’d been preparing for this day all my life.

The contract negotiations didn’t take long at all. Like my daddy said, we weren’t trying to squeeze the last nickel out of the Devil Rays. Casey Close, my agent at the time, handled the negotiations and everybody thought the outcome was fair for both sides.

In the meantime, I graduated high school and played two games for the local American Legion team. I hit three bombs in those two games, and my presence at those games attracted more attention. It was kind of a novelty act for the number-one pick in the nation to be playing in a local Legion game.

Everybody wanted to talk about money. “How much you getting?” “What are they going to pay you?” They looked at me a little differently because I was on the verge of a big payday. It made me a little uncomfortable; I was the same guy, doing the same things I always did.

In fact, I couldn’t even answer when they asked about the money. I didn’t have much of an idea about it. I wasn’t involved in the negotiations, and I knew it was going to be enough to take care of me and my parents for a long time. That’s all that mattered. I also knew I wasn’t going to have more than twenty bucks in my pocket even after the contract was signed. My parents would see to that.

More than anything, I knew I was going to be able to make a living playing ball. Everything else paled in comparison to that one statement. That was all I needed.

The money bought freedom, the kind of freedom that allowed my parents to pull up stakes and go with me wherever the Devil Rays decided to send me. This was the fulfillment of the promise I made when I was twelve — I’d pay off my parents’ debts and free them to travel with me.

My daddy took a leave of absence from his foreman’s job at Ditch Witch, with the idea that he might never come back. My momma quit her job with the Department of Transportation. We got word that I would be sent to the Devil Rays’ Rookie League team in the Class A Appalachian League. We packed up and left for Princeton, West Virginia, the first step in the process of becoming a major-league star.