Inside Baseball: The Best of Tom Verducci (2 page)

In Tom’s case, there’s nothing to be afraid of: The stories in this book are proof that he rarely, if ever, fails. Anyone who has worked with him knows that Tom takes his stories to heart. When you read them, I think you will too.

Houston, Texas

November 2005

BY TOM VERDUCCI

T
HE WAY I REMEMBER IT, THE FIRST TIME I LAID EYES
on a major league ballplayer he was larger than life, or at least bigger than a charter bus. It was 1967, a little more than a month before my seventh birthday. I have no memory that it was the summer Carl Sandburg and Edward Hopper died, that the United States bombed Hanoi, that Thurgood Marshall was named a Supreme Court justice and that Newark, N.J., only a few miles from our home in Glen Ridge, was one of the many American cities torn apart by race riots.

What I do vividly remember is that it was the summer I discovered the music of the Monkees, the friendly comfort of
Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood
and the magic of baseball cards.

Life, as far as I knew it anyway, was very good. And it was never better than when I watched the Washington Senators play the New York Yankees at the vast man-made canyon known as Yankee Stadium.

One of my father’s cousins was married to the great Gil Hodges, then the manager of the Senators. “Uncle Gil,” as we called him, left tickets that day for me, my two older brothers, and our aunt and uncle. I remember looking at those monuments in centerfield—a batted ball happened to roll behind them during the game—and thinking people were buried beneath them. I remember that Frank Howard and Dick Nen hit back-to-back homers for the Senators, who won the game, 6–3, but I did not remember until I researched the game that a guy named Mickey Mantle of the Yankees also a hit a home run that day.

After the game we waited next to the Senators’ team bus, parked behind the rightfield bullpen, to say hello (and goodbye) to Uncle Gil. What happened then made a bigger impression on me than anything that happened in the game. Howard stopped to shake my hand before he got on the bus. I looked up. Way up. At 6-foot-7, Howard was the biggest man I’d ever seen, and from the perspective of a six-year-old kid, he was taller than that great big green bus behind him. Three words came to mind, all of which I was incapable of actually speaking.

Oh.

My.

Goodness.

I learned long ago that looking up to major league ballplayers in a figurative sense is about as dangerous as looking head-on at a moving charter bus: You’re bound to get hurt. But that lesson was nowhere to be found in the accumulated experience of a six-year-old back in 1967. It was impossible then for baseball to disappoint me, and the towering figure of Frank Howard, blotting out the team bus and the afternoon sun, confirmed to me that these men were giants.

Truth is, I was hooked even before I saw what a major league ballplayer looked like up close, back when I first began to walk. When my dad, a teacher and coach, would tune in a baseball game on our black-and-white console TV and watch from the floor, I would grab four pillows and arrange them in a diamond around him. I’d watch closely while standing next to the pillow that was home plate. When the batter swung, I would pantomime a swing of my own and then tear off in my cloth diaper for the bases, touching all the pillows and sliding into home.

Why baseball? Who knows? The perfect geometry of the diamond? The easy pace of the game? Or, more likely, is it about me, about my DNA? Baseball seems as much a part of who I am as brown eyes. The book you are holding springs from my lifelong love for the game, an affection that grows deeper as I continue to learn more about baseball and the people who play it.

I played the game, in its various forms, at every opportunity and, as kids did back then, usually without adults around: Wiffle ball with my brothers in front of the house, stickball at the elementary school and one-ole-cat or a full-blown pickup game at the park where I spent virtually every day of my summers, bothering to come home only when the gas streetlamps began to glow.

My father was a beloved high school football and baseball coach at Seton Hall Prep in South Orange, N.J., and from him I learned about sport not from the top down, by trying to emulate the pros, as most kids do, but from the inside out: the importance of team play, fundamentals, preparation, commitment, humility. Having him for my dad was like having one of those teachers’ textbooks that include the answers to all the questions. His lessons served me well through high school ball, as a bench-warming walk-on outfielder at Penn State, as a professional writer and as a father myself.

It quickly became apparent that writing, like baseball, was another love hard-wired into my system. I always liked words and all you can do with them.

Here are a couple of DNA tests. First, go to your local sporting goods store and walk down the aisle where they keep the baseball equipment. If you can’t make it to the end of the aisle without slipping a glove onto your hand and pounding the pocket with your fist, we share a gene.

Second, read something. Anything written professionally: a book, a magazine, a newspaper. If you do more than just absorb the information—if you also hear and feel the rhythm with which the words were assembled—then we’ve got another genetic match.

All I’ve ever wanted to do was to combine my love for sports, especially baseball, and writing. How fortunate I’ve been to realize that passion, first at
Today
newspaper in Cocoa, Fla., on the Miami Dolphins beat, where coach Don Shula treated everyone, including this 21-year-old rookie reporter, with respect and class, and then to
Newsday
in New York and now SI. As I begin my 25th year on the job, writing baseball is still fresh and exciting and challenging because every day, every game, every story and every combination of words is different.

Baseball writing has introduced me to fabulous places, interesting people and unforgettable moments, most of which—blessedly, as if to heighten the experience—I never saw coming. Sure, I’ve covered grand moments such as the resumption of the Pine Tar Game at Yankee Stadium in 1983, the great home run race of 1998 and every World Series since 1985 except one (1989, due to a broken foot). But some of the smaller moments stay with me just the same.

I once watched Yankees pitcher Tommy John commit three errors on one play, which began as a groundball to the mound.

I saw Dale Berra dry his tears with a sanitary sock in the clubhouse at old Comiskey Park after his father, Yogi, was fired as Yankee manager. And speaking of sanitary socks—this is one image I wish I could shake—I saw another Yankee manager, Stump Merrill, remove his sock after a game in broiling Florida heat and use it to clean the clods of tobacco from between his teeth.

I saw Cal Ripken’s consecutive-game streak nearly end after he twisted his knee in an on-field brawl. I knew something was up when Mr. Reliable, who is so punctual he wore a wristwatch during batting practice, failed to meet me for a lunch we had planned the next day. (He eventually did send word to the restaurant that he wouldn’t make it—for lunch, of course, not that night’s game.)

I shagged flies with other Yankees and Mets beat writers during some early batting practice sessions and quickly learned that when big leaguers hit the ball you have to change the mental calculus you’ve used your whole life and add about 15 feet to where you think it will come down.

I lost some clams to Greg Maddux playing golf, somehow kept my lunch down while working out with Roger Clemens, lifted weights with Mark McGwire as he prepared for the 1998 season, ran with Pedro Martinez in Santo Domingo, trailed Billy Martin on the field and in the bars (which became a vital part of the Yankees beat), sat with Pete Rose in his New York hotel and listened to him confess to betting on baseball, and, in a Manhattan nightclub after the 2000 World Series, had my shins kicked repeatedly by a woman with a cast on her leg who was trying to make more space for herself at Derek Jeter’s very crowded private party.

I’ve worked in 46 major league ballparks, not including the Tokyo Dome, where I covered the only postseason series played in 1994 and was so impressed by a young hitter for the Yomiuri Giants named Hideki Matsui that I brought home for my son a Matsui bank, with a coin slot in the back of its neck.

This book does not span all those years and all those ballparks. It begins with 1993, my first year at SI, a time when steroids were becoming the drug of choice in baseball, just as cocaine had been in the 1980s. Both drugs are accounted for here, as is the arc of what will be known (fairly with regard to some players, unfairly to many others) as the Steroid Era, when the bodies changed and so did the way the game was played.

As in any era, though, the wonders of the game shine through the corruption. There is still time—a need, even—to think along with Maddux, to laugh with Rickey Henderson, to cry with the people whose lives were changed by the 2004 Red Sox, and to stay cool while trying to hit a 94-mph fastball in a major league game. I’ve done all that, and it’s been my job to take you with me. Former commissioner Fay Vincent likes to remember his days spent watching baseball games with his predecessor, the late commissioner Bart Giamatti, who called Vincent, his deputy commissioner, Dep. Giamatti would turn to Vincent and say, “You know, Dep, you’ve got to remember that this is work.” I know the feeling.

Last October, on an unusually warm, bright fall afternoon, I sat in the open-air press box of the new Comiskey Park (as I still call it) in Chicago. It was Game 1 of the American League Division Series between the White Sox and Red Sox. I never have been a fan of any team as an adult. Instead, I’m a fan of the game and I root for extra innings, good stories and a perfectly choreographed relay, outfielder to infielder to catcher. Sitting in the sunshine, the field and players lit with that distinctive golden glow of the postseason sun, I was excited by the possibilities of another October.

It is a long way from that Senators bus to the Comiskey press box—I have a better view now, and a perspective that allows me to see inside baseball—but I still carry with me some of the wonder of that six-year-old boy. Come, have a look yourself.

Montgomery, N.J.

November 2005

DECEMBER 20, 1993

A team’s fall from perennial contender to laughingstock is a
testament to the destructive power of mismanagement

I
T WAS 1988, ONE OF THOSE YEARS OF IMPERFECT GLORY FOR
the New York Mets, before the upper deck of Shea Stadium was closed for lack of interest and before any of the team’s players were slapped with felony charges. Deep into the chilly night of Oct. 9, Dwight Gooden stood on the mound with the baseball in his hands and a two-run ninth-inning lead over the Dodgers. Three outs and the Mets would lead the National League Championship Series three games to one.

“It’s in the bag,” thought Mets senior vice president Al Harazin. Gooden had permitted the Dodgers only three hits—all singles, none of them after the fourth inning. “Doc’s going to win his first postseason game.”

Gooden quickly had an 0-and-2 count on John Shelby, the easiest hitter in the league to strike out. Yes, the Mets were nearly a lock to play the Athletics in a titanic World Series, the first matchup of 100-win teams in 18 years. Except something began to go wrong. Gooden walked Shelby in an eight-pitch at bat. He seemed to labor on the last two deliveries, fastballs high and away. He had thrown 125 pitches.

Reserve infielder Dave Magadan squirmed in the Mets dugout and thought, “Scioscia’s up, Myers is in the bullpen…. Please put him in the game.” But the lefthanded Randy Myers was not ready to face the lefthanded Mike Scioscia. Myers wasn’t even warming up. No one was.

“He’s still in control,” manager Davey Johnson thought about Gooden. “If I bring in Myers, they’ll pinch-hit Rick Dempsey anyway. He’s more of a home run threat than Scioscia.”