The Arm (31 page)

“All day today, I go from moments of being pissed off, and then moments of being like, what the fuck,” Coffey said. “This season is a complete waste.”

Convincing him otherwise was futile, no matter how hard Jennifer or Rick Thurman tried. In a comeback defined by setbacks, none deflated Coffey like this one. He had talked himself into believing that sprinting into a major league game and doing a 360 was his fate, that his good work in Triple-A would matter, that the low moments these past two-plus years since his second Tommy John surgery existed for a reason.

All the buckets of rice, for nothing.

“I figured, you know, playoff push, they're going to want veterans,” Coffey said. “They're not going to throw a young kid out there to get his ass handed to him. That, and the way I've been pitching.”

The bone-chip surgery, for naught.

“The shit that I've jumped through to get here,” Coffey said. “And the fact that talking to Rick today, he was like, ‘You should be in the big leagues somewhere.'”

Rescuing himself from the showcase debacle, for this.

“The biggest kick in the balls was they had somebody from the front office here today,” Coffey said. “He comes up to me to shake my hand. ‘We appreciate everything you're doing this season on and off the field.'”

Putting up a 1.83 ERA, for an opportunity that may never have existed in the first place.

“I need an explanation,” Coffey said. “That's what I asked Rick. Did they give a reason why, or did they say they're not gonna do it? That's my thing. I need a reason. I don't know why. I just need a reason. That's what I can't figure out. I've shown I can pitch multiple innings. I've gone multiple days in a row. I just need a reason.”

He didn't realize that since he had arrived in Tacoma in late May, Carson Smith actually had pitched better than him. Lower ERA. More strikeouts. Fewer walks. Fewer home runs. All of the categories were close, but Smith had a future with the Mariners. He was a big kid, too, six feet six, with a fastball in the low to mid-90s and a slider in the mid-80s. At twenty-four, Smith was just ninety-five days older than Coffey had been when he'd made his major league debut. A younger version of himself had stolen Coffey's future.

Every pitcher of his ilk—good enough to kick around the big leagues for a decade but just one year at a time—comes with a sell-by date that moves closer with every injury. What used to be good enough no longer sufficed. Impressing scouts wasn't adequate. Coffey needed to flabbergast them, and even if he did touch 96 on occasion, more than fifty major league relief pitchers in 2014 av
eraged that velocity, and another hundred hit it at least once. Two hundred fifty relievers sat at 93 miles per hour or better. Nearly every bullpen could stock itself full of guys whose objective measurements rivaled Coffey's. The baseball world Coffey believed in—full of slop, with a place for him—did not exist.

He hoped another team would show interest. Thurman considered Pittsburgh a possibility. Coffey loved the idea of going to Detroit, which was one-half game behind Seattle for the second wild-card spot. Joel Hanrahan, the reliever coming off Tommy John to whom the Tigers gave a million dollars, never threw a pitch for them. They needed bullpen help. “What I want to do,” Coffey said, “is go to Detroit and shove it up Seattle's ass. I want it to come down to where I pitch and cost them the playoffs.”

Because he did not take his opt-outs, Coffey's mobility now hinged on the Mariners' willingness to let him go. And that almost surely would depend on whether a market developed. Thurman wasn't terribly optimistic. For thirty years, he had represented luminaries like Trevor Hoffman and Tim Lincecum. Thurman was a former minor pitcher himself who retired due to a bad arm, so he appreciated life on the fringes and tried to convince executives that Coffey wasn't just another past-his-prime veteran. “I feel terrible, too,” Thurman said. “I almost feel like I failed. When I believe in someone, I don't miss too often. And I totally believe in where he's at. It's not him. He's done his end. I'm just keeping my fingers crossed something happens. He's worked so hard. He deserves to be there.”

Deserve or not, he wasn't. Purgatory had turned out to be hell. This was even worse than how Coffey imagined Casey McEvoy's existence: living on the cusp but not there, blue-balled to the point of emotional detachment. At around one a.m. on the night he found out, on the drive back to the Seattle apartment he rented, figuring it was just a matter of time until the Mariners summoned him, Coffey said he wasn't sure he could return to the Tacoma Rainiers. “I can't give anything,” he said. “My heart is not in this now. I don't know.”

The next day, Coffey arrived at his usual time. He cleared out his locker because it was Tacoma's last home game of the season. In the ninth inning, Rainiers manager Roy Howell called on him. He channeled his rage into what he loved doing most, what he never would let go, and he struck out the side. Coffey hit the road with the Rainiers through their final game September 1, still puzzled, still without an explanation.

When he sought clarity after the season, he found even more confusion. “The Mariners will not release me,” Coffey said on September 3. Two days earlier, Thurman had called Jeff Kingston, the Mariners' assistant GM, and asked for Seattle to let Coffey go, just in case another team wanted him as insurance for the final month. According to Thurman, Mariners GM Jack Zduriencik said no because he feared Coffey would go to another team fighting Seattle for a playoff spot.

“I don't think that's accurate at all,” Zduriencik told me. Among the most polarizing GMs in baseball, Zduriencik had a mixed reputation among players, former coworkers, adversaries, and agents. Coffey believed he could trust Zduriencik. By September 3, he had assigned Zduriencik a new middle name. “Jack Fucking Zduriencik is the reason I'm not in the big leagues right now,” Coffey said.

Thurman eventually called Zduriencik and read him the riot act, saying, “Don't tell me you're going to limit him to not playing for a team that would directly be in conflict with you guys.”

Zduriencik denied it. “You don't want to hold anybody hostage for any reason whatsoever,” he told me. “But if we didn't invite any particular player from the minor leagues to join our big league club, it was because we thought we had better options. We brought players to the big leagues that we thought could help us. Case closed. Carson Smith in our opinion deserved to be called to the big leagues. Case closed. Not because of somebody else. Only because of him. And that would've been the case with every guy. If we didn't call someone to the big leagues, we didn't think they were going to help us to the degree that we wanted them to.”

While Zduriencik's passive-aggressive tone wouldn't win him any congeniality contests—the only time he referred to Coffey by name was when he said, “I'm really not sure why this conversation is in regards to Todd Coffey”—he brought up a good point: “I don't think I got a phone call about him.” Other teams' interest in him was at best minimal, at worst nonexistent.

Coffey said Kansas City had inquired, but Royals GM Dayton Moore told me, “Nobody felt that he was an upgrade over what we currently have in the major leagues.” The Pirates asked, too, but only for depth purposes. They wouldn't give a forty-man-roster spot to Coffey. He needed one great report, written by a scout willing to go back to his GM and urge him to sign a thirty-three-year-old on his second Tommy John recovery, and that simply did not exist.

“I am not just brokenhearted, but absolutely upset,” Coffey said. “I have done everything I can for this team. Helped them out on and off the field. I stayed there because of their word. If I knew they weren't going to honor it, I would've taken my out.”

When he landed back in Seattle, Coffey jumped in the car with Jennifer and Declan, who was approaching his second birthday. Off they went through Montana, the first leg of the forty hours it would take to return to Rutherfordton.
Toy Story 3
and
Alvin and the Chipmunks
, the two movies that would silence Declan, played on a loop. Around six p.m. on September 3, as Coffey closed in on Mount Rushmore, his cell phone rang. The Mariners had granted his release.

As Coffey drove into the dusk, the baseball world continued on without him. There were games to be played. The baseball world kept turning, rebalancing itself. One man gone, another one back.

I
N HIS DREAMS, DANIEL HUDSON
stood on the pitcher's mound. He was back in the major leagues. His delivery felt perfect: short arm
path, hand on top, good balance through deceleration. The ball left his fingers as intended, but on the way to the plate, it lost all momentum. As it fell to the grass, Hudson snapped awake.

His mind was often an even greater enemy at times than his arm. Nothing, not even his subconscious, could sabotage Hudson now. On the 799th day since he had last thrown a major league pitch, he took an escalator up three levels from the ground floor of the Omni San Diego, walked thirty steps across a breezeway, and slinked past a half-asleep security guard at the gate that connects the hotel and Petco Park, home of the San Diego Padres. I walked alongside Hudson as he entered his first major league ballpark in more than two years. He surveyed the field, familiar with all its features but one. “I've never been in the bullpen,” he said. If Hudson was going to throw in San Diego, it would be on September 3, the final night in town for his parents, Sam and Kris, who had flown in from Virginia to celebrate the occasion with Sara and Baylor.

He was starting to feel like a big leaguer again. Earlier in the week, his catcher, Miguel Montero, and outfielder Cody Ross told Hudson he'd been gone so long he'd have to participate during dress-up hazing for rookies. He told them to fuck off. Despite the September doldrums—Arizona was nineteen and a half games out of first place—occasional laughter pierced the quiet of the Diamondbacks' clubhouse. Hudson was splayed out on a couch, reading a story on his phone, when a fart of unknown origin reverberated off the clubhouse's low ceilings. Ross accused Diamondbacks manager Kirk Gibson, whose denial couldn't have been more vehement. “I wouldn't lie about that,” Gibson said. “I'd be proud.” The culprit remained at large.

Hudson missed this. The most puerile elements of life in baseball were among the most appealing. Even before he threw a pitch, he was back, and his return energized the clubhouse. Hudson would never be the face of the Diamondbacks, a responsibility foisted on first baseman Paul Goldschmidt, but few players on the
Diamondbacks' roster commanded the respect Hudson did, and his return would be a winning moment in a lost season.

“I love Huddy,” Diamondbacks trainer Ken Crenshaw said. “He's a great guy. A great worker. You just pull for him. You want to see him get back and pitch so he can have some comfort in his mind.”

Sam, Kris, and Sara certainly weren't comfortable midway through the game. They figured Hudson had no shot at getting in as Diamondbacks starter Josh Collmenter needed just fifty pitches through four innings and Andrew Cashner, the Padres' starter, matched him pitch for pitch in a 1–1 game. The lack of offense was routine for the Padres, who would finish the season with a .226 batting average, the worst team average in baseball since 1972. Arizona, which had scored the fewest runs in the National League during August, didn't want to insert Hudson in a close game. “He ain't ever getting in with our offense,” quipped Diamondbacks' starter Wade Miley the night before.

In section 114, row 39, Hudson's family waited. Dumb videos played between innings. The ballpark had all the charm of a mortuary, its upper deck empty and the masochists in the lower one content to witness two bad teams living down to expectations. Sam sat with interlocked fingers, waiting for a reason to unfasten them and clap. Kris slung an arm over his shoulder and patted his back. “You realize how late our nights are gonna be if he stays in this role?” she said.

Baylor wore a pink dress that covered a baseball shirt. Earlier in the day, a stranger mistook her for a boy, so Sara went to her cache of headbands and picked one with a pink, rhinestoned bow. Modern motherhood fit her well: she held Baylor in her left arm, a baby bottle in her left hand, and a phone blowing up with text messages in her right hand.

“I just want him to get in to get it over with,” she said.

“I'm nervous,” Sam said.

“Not yet,” Kris said.

In the fifth inning, a pair of dim fielding plays allowed the Diamondbacks to score three runs. Sara smirked as the Padres threw a ball into left field during a rundown, saying, “We'll take an inning like this.” Sam rocked side to side. “All right,” Sara said. “Keep fucking up. We need all the help we can get.” Baylor slept.

Collmenter cruised through the bottom of the inning on ten pitches. A complete game was well within his reach. More than four hundred feet away, in the bullpen, Hudson silently rooted for a long inning. “I felt bad doing it,” Hudson later admitted. “Nobody wants that. I would never root for him to get lit up. Guy just foul seven pitches off.”

Sara's mom, her dog trainer, and her neighbors kept texting, asking for updates and pitch counts. After a leadoff single in the bottom of the sixth, the Diamondbacks' bullpen stirred. Instead of squinting to see the uniform number, Sara glanced at the pitcher's legs. “I know those thighs anywhere,” she said. “Thunder thighs.” It was Hudson.

Almost immediately, Collmenter induced a double-play ground ball. Hudson sat back down, his teammates apparently determined to keep him waiting until day eight hundred. “Gibby and I are gonna have some words,” Sara joked about manager Kirk Gibson. She was frustrated, Baylor was crying, and Kris was releasing nervous energy by scratching Sam's back. Meanwhile, Hudson's brother, Dylan, kept sending Kris text messages, saying things like: “Are they gonna put him in? He looks bored as shit.”