The Closer (6 page)

If I don’t make it to the top, it isn’t going to be because somebody outworked me.

I move up to Single-A ball in 1991, pitching for the Greensboro Hornets in the South Atlantic League, splitting time between starting and relieving. It makes no difference to me at all. I will rake the mound if they want me to. The bigger challenge for me is off the field. I’ve gotten off to a good start learning English, thanks to Coop, but unlike Tampa, Greensboro, North Carolina, is a place where almost nobody speaks my native language. It is tremendously isolating. In restaurants and malls and convenience stores, my English shortcomings keep slamming into me.

I try to ask somebody for directions after a game one day.

Excuse me, my English no good, you can tell me how…

I stammer and wobble all over the place, and can’t manage to
say anything. I thought I was way beyond this, but now my English seems to be getting worse. Another time, I ask a clerk in a store a question about merchandise and again come up with nothing. I return to my apartment feeling so alone, more defeated than I have on the field the whole season. I don’t know why it hits me in that moment, but it does. I feel like a sardine out of water, tangled in a net with no chance for escape. It feels really bad, completely overwhelming. I start to cry. I go to the bathroom and wash my face and look in the mirror. I turn out the light and go to bed.

I am still crying.

My linguistic pity party doesn’t last long. I find Coop the next day.

I need to work on English, Coop. I am not doing good with it. I have to be able to talk when I win the World Series, right?

Coop smiles. We’ve got a lot of road trips left this year, he says. You are going to be giving speeches by the time we’re done.

I don’t give too many speeches, and don’t give up too many runs, either. My elbow doesn’t feel right all season, honestly, but I don’t say anything because I don’t want anybody to know. No sense jeopardizing anything by speaking up about pain that I can manage. So I just keep pitching. Thanks to the much longer road trips in the South Atlantic League, Coop and I have four- and six- and eight- hour bus rides to speak English and Spanish. The extra hours make all the difference. I get comfortable speaking English at last. I am not lost anymore. I am not alone. Tim Cooper is some teammate. Cuts hair, gives language lessons, saves no-hitters. He and I learn an awful lot on those long trips, and not just language.

If we ever make it to the top, let’s make a deal that we’re never going to big-league anybody, Coop says. We’re never going to act better than anybody or look down on anybody, because that’s not what real big leaguers do.

That’s right, I say. We don’t big-league anybody. We stay humble. We remember where we came from.

What’s important is how you treat people. That’s what really matters, right? Coop says.

Amen, Coop.

This simple truth becomes a beacon for how to live life for me, in baseball and out of baseball. The Lord doesn’t care about wealth or fame or the number of saves somebody has. We are all the children of God, and the Lord cares about the goodness and love in our hearts. That’s all.

My faith in what’s important helps me appreciate the moment. Players in the minor leagues always curse the marathon bus rides, the fume-filled hours that are supposed to be the dreary essence of life in the bush leagues. Me, I can’t see it the same way. Without those bus rides, I don’t learn the language I have to learn. I don’t reaffirm the values I want to live by.

I finish the year with a 2.75 ERA and more than a strikeout per inning, even though my record stinks (4–9). I remain a complete nobody in the orbit of prospects, but you know what attention I pay to
Baseball America
and all this ranking nonsense?

None.

I don’t care what some ranking list says, what arbitrary judgment a computer spits out based on a bunch of data. When they give me the ball, I take it. I pitch. Most of the time I get people out.

Simple is best.

My trip home after the season lasts only four days, because I have to go back for instructional ball. All I want to do is see Clara. We have been together for six years now. She meets me at the airport and I give her a hug and a kiss. I know that it is time. Three years before I signed, Clara and I went for a walk and sat down on a bench at a little park near the water. It was a beautiful, starlit night, and we looked at the sky and decided that if either of us saw a shooting star we would make a wish but had to wish out loud before it disappeared.

Suddenly a star shot across the sky.

To get married to Clara, I said, as fast as I could get the words out. Clara laughed. We both knew we were not getting married at seventeen, but now it is a different time, the right time.

The next night, I invite Clara to go to a Chinese restaurant in Panama City called Don Lee. We take the two buses, the usual involved trip. Don Lee is not fancy, but we like it. And it is all we can afford. It’s in the banking district, with the name written in neon in big script. As we approach the restaurant, there is a guy selling roses.

I buy one and give it to Clara.

We sit down at the restaurant.

I love you so much and I missed you so much when I was away, I say.

I love you and missed you, too, Clara says.

We get the menus and the water. I know why we are here but just don’t know how to get the words out. I keep looking across the table at Clara. How much do I love this woman? How much do I want to spend my life with her?

The words still have not come. The noodles have, but not the words.

Finally, Clara says, We’ve been going together all these years. Where is this going?

I smile and grab her hand. I feel foolish that Clara takes the lead, but this is just one of the reasons I love her. Her strength. Her conviction. Her sense of the moment.

Where is this going? I say. I want to get married, Clara. I don’t want to be away from you anymore. I will be back in a little over a month. It is crazy, I know. I will be gone, so you will have to arrange everything. All the work, all the planning. But I want to get married and I would love to do it when I come back.

Okay, Clara says. I don’t know what took you so long.

I fly back to instructional ball, and Clara takes care of everything—the invitations, the reception, the food, the music, the photographer, you name it. We get married before a judge on November 6, 1991, and then have the public wedding, and the party, November 9. The celebration is held in the Fisherman’s Hall in Puerto Caimito. I am a fisherman’s boy from a fishing village. You were expecting the Ritz-Carlton? The Fisherman’s Hall is a pavilion with a roof and no walls. Clara cooks. My mother cooks. I even cook. We all spend the final days preparing arroz con pollo (chicken with rice), puerco asado (roast pork), empanadas, tamales, all kinds of stuff. We have ceviches (marinated fish) for an appetizer. Clara’s cousin is our photographer.

We eat and laugh and dance. It is as simple as it can be, with the smell of fish in the air, and it is the happiest day of my life because it is exactly what a wedding day should be about: a celebration of how blessed we are to each be the other’s true love.

I
F
I
HAVE HAD
a better year in my life than 1991, I can’t remember when. I marry Clara, progress as a pitcher, and learn to speak reasonable English. There is just one problem in the midst of all the good. The pain in my elbow never gets any better. In fact, despite my determined efforts to ignore it and pray for it to disappear, it gets worse. Our trainer, Greg Spratt, and I manage it as best we can. I ice it all the time. I make sure to warm up properly. But the pain never relents, and I just hope the off-season rest will get it to stop barking.

With the wedding behind us, Clara and I start our life together in a puny room inside her mother’s house in Puerto Caimito, a space that is a little bigger than a coaching box, with room for a double bed and not much more. Our closet consists of two nails and a broomstick. Fortunately, we have very few clothes. The living is humble even by Puerto Caimito standards, but I have a plan, and that is to save every penny so we can build our own home. We live with her mother, and the broomstick, for four years, even after I make the big leagues.

You do what you need to do.

I spend the winter training with Chico again, a 5:00 a.m. regular on the Puerto Caimito/Chorrera/Panama City bus loop, and even as I put in the work, I am so grateful for this man’s loyalty and
kindness. He just gives and gives. His reward is seeing me do well. That’s it. He takes me places, arranges workouts, helps with mechanics, teaches me how to be a professional—his contributions know no bounds. Whatever I need, Chico Heron is there. You do not forget people like this.

It pays off—all of the work, and all of Chico’s help. In the spring of 1992 I get promoted to high Single-A ball, and the Fort Lauderdale Yankees of the Florida State League. It’s not Yankee Stadium, but if you keep moving forward, even a level at a time, it usually means you are still in the mix. The way I see it, if I put all my concentration into making every pitch a good one, can I possibly go wrong? I don’t have a timetable. My timetable is the next pitch.

One of my teammates in Fort Lauderdale is a kid I’d heard a whole lot about. How could you not have heard about Brien Taylor? He was the number one overall pick in the major league draft in 1991, the Yankees’ prize for having their worst record in almost seventy-five years, finishing 67–95, in last place in the American League by a wide margin. Brien signed for a record bonus of $1.55 million, a contract that was negotiated by his mother, Bettie, and the family advisor, Scott Boras, and that instantly made him The Future of the Franchise, and a tourist attraction before he even put on his uniform.

Brien warms up before a Florida State League game, and the scene around the bullpen looks like a mall two days before Christmas, everybody clamoring to see the most famous young left arm in baseball. He is mobbed by fans and autograph seekers everywhere we go. One time he is so swarmed he falls down and almost gets trampled. His No. 19 jersey is actually stolen from our clubhouse, a crime that I don’t believe was ever solved. Everybody is caught up in Brien Taylor Mania, even Mark Newman, the Yankees minor league boss, who, after Brien’s first start, or maybe his
second, compares him to Mozart. I am not even compared to a backup singer for Menudo.

Other than the $1,548,000 difference in our bonuses, Brien and I are separated by… everything. He is a left-handed African American, a high-school kid from eastern North Carolina. I am a right-handed Latino, a twenty-two-year-old from southern Panama. He is a prodigy. I am a project. He grew up on the shores of the Atlantic. I grew up on the shores of the Pacific.
60 Minutes
wants to speak to him for a profile.
60 Minutes
wouldn’t know my name even with a program. He has a brand-new Mustang with a souped-up sound system. I don’t even know how to drive.

Still, we connect easily. He strikes me as a down-home country kid who would much rather not have any of the fuss that surrounds him. He’s fun to be with, a good teammate, somebody who wants to be one of the guys, even though he’s obviously different. I find out how different the first time I see him throw in the bullpen, marveling at his silky motion, one that you can’t believe is the force behind a ball that hits the catcher’s glove like a firecracker. He throws 97, 98 miles per hour, the easiest gas you’ve ever seen, and has a big hard curveball, too.

I watch and I think:
This is amazing, the weapons this guy has. I have never seen anybody throw a baseball like this. Wow.

Brien is the top-rated prospect in all of baseball, and in his first pro season, straight out of Beaufort’s East Carteret High School, he proves why. He gives up 40 fewer hits than innings pitched, and strikes out 187 batters in just 161.1 innings. His earned run average is 2.57. His stuff is ahead of his command and he is still learning the craft of pitching, but what a baseline to be starting at. He moves up to the Albany-Colonie Yankees and Double-A ball the following year, and now that he’s just two rungs on the pro ladder away from the big leagues, The Future is almost here. You can
imagine him on the Yankee Stadium mound, blowing away hitters the way he has his whole young life.

Brien’s going to show us the way,
I think.
There is no stopping The Future now.

And then, a week before Christmas, 1993, I hear the news. I am home in Panama with Clara. The report on the TV isn’t immediately clear to me. All I hear are sketchy details about Brien Taylor and a fight. It honestly doesn’t sound like such a big deal. Then other facts start coming in, something about defending his brother and getting involved in a brawl in a trailer park in his hometown, and hurting his shoulder.

His left shoulder.

Tell me this is not true,
I think.
Tell me this is not going to have any impact on his big league career.

Brien winds up having surgery, and rehabs through all of 1994. The Yankees bring him back in 1995, in the Gulf Coast League, wanting to let him break in slowly, but the fluidity, the smoke, the domination that seemed to come so easily, they are gone. He has no idea where the ball is going. A year later, he is much worse, walking almost three guys an inning and putting up an earned run average that could be off a pinball machine.

I never see Brien again.

The whole thing is so horribly sad—to think that the course of his entire life could be altered by a fit of anger and a momentary lapse in judgment. You wonder if what happened in the trailer park had anything to do with Brien’s name and fame—if the guy would’ve come after him if he’d just been a regular person. You wonder why Brien didn’t understand in that instant that getting into a fight would not be a good idea. It just makes you realize how it can all crater so quickly, leaving a hole that is beyond repair. And for Brien, the hole just seemed to get deeper, with a conviction
years later on federal cocaine-dealing charges that put him in a penitentiary.

I obviously was not in Brien’s shoes that night, or any other night, so who am I to judge? I just try to take away what I can from every situation, to always keep learning. Life is hard. Life is humbling. I do all I can to keep it simple and to pray to the Lord for clarity and wisdom, so that His will and His Perfect Goodness will guide me and keep me safe. And if I ever start to falter, it’s not too hard to remember Brien Taylor, who effectively traded in his Yankees jersey for a prison uniform, a baseball diamond for the Federal Correctional Institution at Fort Dix, New Jersey.

The Yankees decide that I am a starter in 1992, and I start off well in Fort Lauderdale. The elbow pain is manageable, and if I don’t compare to our top pitchers, Brien and Domingo Jean, I am a pretty fair number three starter for the Florida State League. I strike out twelve in one early-season victory and follow it with a complete-game shutout of the Fort Myers Miracle, and get congratulations from my manager, Brian Butterfield, and pitching coach, Mark Shiflett, when I am the league’s pitcher of the week in mid-May. My precision is better than ever—I walk five guys the whole season—and I am pitching to an earned run average just over two, but as the year goes on a couple of troubling trends are emerging.

One is that my velocity plummets after I’ve thrown fifty or sixty pitches. The other is that the slider I am trying to throw seems to aggravate whatever is going on in my elbow. It gets bad enough that the Yankees decide to put me on the disabled list in late July to see if rest alleviates the problem.

I stay optimistic, because that is what I do. I’m in my third productive year of pro baseball. There is no reason to panic. I take a break from throwing for a couple of weeks and return in early August against the Dunedin Blue Jays. The Jays have the most
dangerous hitter in the league, Carlos Delgado, a twenty-year-old slugger from Puerto Rico. Carlos is on his way to a thirty–home run, one hundred–RBI season, with a .324 average, in the middle of a lineup that also includes Shawn Green, Derek Bell, and Canadian outfielder Rob Butler, who winds up hitting .358, best in the league.

It’s a Friday night in Fort Lauderdale, and I am ready for the challenge of a seriously stacked lineup. I am pitching well, and I move into the fourth inning when the Blue Jays get a man on first. I see him taking a good-sized lead. I fire over to chase him back, but as I do I feel something funny in my elbow. It’s hard to describe, but it’s not normal.

Definitely not normal.

I catch the return throw and take a moment on the mound. My elbow is throbbing. I turn my sights back to the plate and deliver, and now I feel a hard pop in my elbow, as if something just gave out. Or snapped.

Or ruptured.

I get the ball back from the catcher and pause again on the mound. I look around the park, and at the pockets of fans here and there, maybe a few hundred people in all. They are waiting for the next pitch, and it occurs to me that not one of them—not anybody in the whole park, even in the dugout and bullpen—knows that I am not the same pitcher I was two pitches ago. How could they know? How could they possibly have any clue about what just happened inside my right elbow?

I look the same, but I am not.

I finish the inning and walk to the dugout, my elbow hot and pulsing with pain. I know I am not going to be walking back out there, facing Carlos Delgado or anybody else, any time soon.

I can’t pitch, I tell Mark Shiflett. The pain is bad.

The trainer, Darren London, packs my elbow in ice, and I spend
the rest of the game on the bench. It is a strange sensation to be out there competing with everything you’ve got one second, and to be a bystander the next. Something goes pop and, faster than you can say Tommy John, you are damaged goods. You try not to project, but you can’t lie to yourself.

You know—absolutely know—this is not good.

Does this mean surgery? How long will I be out? What will I need to do to get better? My head is swirling with questions, but somehow I do not feel any deep anxiety, or anything close to despair. It is the peace and grace of the Lord; it cannot be anything else. Of course I am not happy about the pain and whatever repercussions there will be. Of course I am concerned about my future. But I am not flipping out about it. When the fishing nets were frayed or broken, we fixed them. When the engine on the boat broke, we did all we could to fix it. I come at life from a mechanic’s mind-set. If you’ve got a problem, you find it and you take care of it. That’s exactly what I’m going to do with my elbow.

The process isn’t always pleasant, but it is simple, and straightforward. You do yourself no good by worrying or projecting, letting thunderheads of gloom set up in your head.

We’re going to get your elbow looked at and take good care of it, Darren London says.

Okay, thanks, Darren, I say.

I go back to my apartment and think about calling Clara but decide against it. It wouldn’t be fair. All it would do is make her feel terrible that she is not with me. After a bad night of sleep—the elbow is really inflamed and tender—I undergo a series of tests with a Yankee doctor in Miami. The MRIs apparently do not show damage to the ulnar collateral ligament. Then there are more tests, and finally they send me to see Dr. Frank Jobe, the same doctor who would operate on Brien Taylor. He is the king of all elbow-fixers, and the inventor of Tommy John surgery—a term that has
become as much a part of the baseball vocabulary as grand-slam home run, or performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs).

If you hang around pitchers for any length of time, I guarantee you will hear a conversation that goes something like this:

You ever have Tommy John?

Yeah, two years ago.

How did it go?

Pretty good. Took a while, but eventually I threw even better.

How about you?

Yeah, mine was three years ago.

How did it go?

Same thing. It was a rough road, but I’m all the way back.

Tommy John surgery is a reconstruction of the ulnar collateral ligament in the elbow. Elbows don’t like throwing baseballs ninety-plus miles per hour, thousands upon thousands of times, and when the ligament goes, it has to be rebuilt with a ligament from your forearm.

In Los Angeles, Dr. Jobe provides the diagnosis: I have a lot of wear, and I have stuff floating around in my elbow. I am going to require surgery, but I do not need a total reconstruction, just a thorough cleanup. It includes the removal of my funny bone, but at least it doesn’t put me in the Tommy John Club. I take in Dr. Jobe’s words as I sit in his office and don’t say anything at first. I am too busy talking to myself:

This injury is not going to define me. It is not going to stop me. I will have the surgery I need and do whatever I have to do to get back.

Dr. Jobe performs my surgery on August 27, 1992. It’s not a day that you’ll find commemorated anywhere in the annals of baseball history (though it is the ten-year anniversary of Rickey Henderson breaking the single-season stolen-base record). It’s just the day I get my elbow cleaned up—and (I hope) a fresh, pain-free start to my pitching career.

Dr. Jobe does a great job on my elbow, and he also does a great job predicting the future.