Wherever I Wind Up (2 page)

This should be interesting. I wonder who they’re predicting big things from.

I look up the Texas Rangers section. Why not start with my own organization? The authors roll out half a thesaurus to praise the Rangers’ power-laden lineup, Alex Rodriguez and Juan Gonzalez and the rest. They talk about Pudge Rodríguez being the best catcher in the game and rave about a kid named Michael Young. I keep reading. They don’t do nearly as much raving about the Rangers’ pitchers or their pitching prospects. I scan farther down, seeing if I am in there at all.

Finally, I find my name at the bottom. It is in bold type, like the other names. I can’t tell you I remember the exact text a decade later, but this is within a few words of verbatim:

In the farm system, the Rangers’ alleged prospects include former first-round draft pick, R.A. Dickey, a marginal right-hander who has given no indication that he’s ever going to amount to anything.

I consider throwing the book, but don’t. I close it and put it back on the shelf.

Marginal.
This is what I have been reduced to, at least in the estimation of the authors. A
marginal
right-hander. It’s a hard word to read. A brutal word to read. But are they wrong?

You tell me.

When you spend seven seasons in the same minor-league location, when you log almost fourteen years and three hundred games in the minors overall, you’re not on what you’d call the fast track. You are not on any track at all.

You may get called “has-been” or “never-was” but you can be fairly certain that you are not anybody’s idea of a phenom anymore.

Doing all that minor-league meandering tends to leave you in one of two camps. You either resign yourself to never getting out, to just playing out the string until your skills erode or you’ve had it with the back roads and bus rides. Or you go the other way and convince yourself that you absolutely still have a chance to make the big leagues, even if all available evidence suggests otherwise. You keep finding a way to hold on to hope, keep waiting for the Call, and if and when it comes, you make darn sure that you don’t give the club any reason ever to send you back down.

I am in Camp Number Two. And hanging on by a fingernail of hope is exactly where I find my non-phenom self in the early spring of 2006, when the Texas Rangers hand me number 45. It is the fourth day of the season. We are playing the Detroit Tigers at home, at the Ballpark in Arlington, as it was then called. Against considerable odds, I have made the Rangers’ starting rotation out of spring training and am beginning my first full season as a knuckleball pitcher. The pitch is still a work in progress, some days good, more days not so good, but if Buck Showalter thinks I’m ready, what am I supposed to do, decline?

Say, “Thanks, Skip, but I think some of the kids are more deserving”?

No. I wasn’t going to do that.

I am thirty-one years old and darn tired of being mediocre. Anne and I have two young daughters and a baby boy on the way. I am living in a Hyatt and getting around on a borrowed bicycle because I don’t want to spend money on a rental car. One part retread, one part restoration project, I am a decade removed from my years studying English lit at Tennessee, forgetting a lot of Faulkner and firing a lot of fastballs. I have become the quintessential “4A” pitcher—baseball code for a player who is too good for Triple-A but not good enough to stick in the majors. I had already spent two full, extremely undistinguished years in the big leagues. I know that I cannot reasonably expect to get another shot if this doesn’t work out.

You want to know how desperate I am? I have turned myself into the baseball equivalent of a carnival act—maybe not a two-headed turtle or a bearded lady, but close. I am trying to make a living throwing the ugly stepchild of pitches, a pitch few in the game appreciate and even fewer understand. Almost nobody starts out planning to be a knuckleball pitcher. When was the last time you heard a twelve-year-old Little Leaguer say, “I want to be Hoyt Wilhelm when I grow up”? You become a knuckleball pitcher when you hit a dead end, when your arm gets hurt or your hard stuff isn’t getting the job done. Tim Wakefield was a minor-league first baseman with a lot of power and a bad batting average; that’s when he made the switch. I made mine when the Rangers told me, in the middle of 2005, that I was going nowhere with my regular stuff—an assessment that I could hardly argue with.

I’d been going nowhere for a long time, after all.

AT 3:45 P.M.
on Thursday, April 6, I walk out of the Hyatt, hop on the bike, and pedal to the Ballpark for the most important start of my baseball life. I cannot view it any other way. I roll up to the park after a ten-minute ride. It’s time for my far-flung odyssey to stop, for some measure of stability to start.

I know the only way that’s going to happen is by getting big-league hitters out.

After eating a turkey sandwich in the players’ lounge, I head for the video room to watch a tape of Wakefield pitching against the Tigers the year before. I’m not looking for specific strategies on how to attack Pudge Rodríguez (he left the Rangers via free agency after the 2004 season) or Magglio Ordóñez so much as reassurance that major-league hitters can be retired with the pitch. It’s a positive-imaging exercise for me, balm for an insecure soul. I have zero confidence in myself, and in the consistency of my knuckleball. I don’t really want to send R. A. Dickey out there against the Tigers. I want to send out Tim Wakefield, the most successful knuckleball pitcher of the 1990s and 2000s.

If it works for him, maybe it will work for me.

Ninety minutes before game time I take a shower, spending most of it visualizing myself going after every Tiger batter. When I am finished, I say a prayer out loud. I put on my uniform and go out to the outfield with the bullpen catcher, Josh Frasier. I start throwing and I feel good. I have a pretty good knuckler on flat ground. After a few minutes we move onto the bullpen mound, and I am throwing it even better, the ball fluttering, my confidence building to unaccustomed levels. When you throw a knuckleball, you want to have the same release point every pitch. You want your arm and your elbow at the exact right angle, and you want your nails biting into the horsehide the same way. The ball is moving well and I have good control over it. I am locked in.

The PA man announces the lineups. It’s almost time.

I walk in from the bullpen and sit on the bench. I run a towel over my face and take a swig of water. I wonder how Nate Robertson, the Tigers starter, is feeling at this very moment. As I prepare to go out to the mound, I pray for confidence, for good health, for the courage to get after them.

“Be glorified, Lord,” I say.

I remind myself to stay positive. It all feels good.

The Tigers’ leadoff hitter is Brandon Inge, their third baseman. Inge is not a typical leadoff guy; he strikes out often and is not inclined to be patient, but he does have a lot of pop in his bat. I throw him a knuckleball for a strike to start the game. I wind and deliver the 0–1 pitch, a knuckler that tumbles slowly toward the inner part of the plate. It feels okay coming out of my hand, but it has too much rotation. Rotation is the mortal enemy of knuckleballers, the thing we spend years working to eliminate. When knuckleballs rotate, they don’t move. They sit up and often disappear. As the ball nears the plate, I can actually see Inge’s eyes grow wide.

He swings and puts serious wood on it, driving the ball deep to left. I follow the flight of the ball, and watch it go over the fence.

Two pitches into the game, I am already down a run. Not the start I had in mind. At all.

I get the next two guys and then Ordóñez steps in. On a 1–0 pitch, I float another knuckleball toward the plate. He coils and takes a rip. A loud thwack fills the park, and then another ball disappears over the left-field wall. Two-nothing is the score, and .500 is the Tigers’ batting average against me, and even in that moment I know why.

I had prayed for confidence but the fact is I don’t have any. Once there are real live hitters at the plate, I turn into a completely different pitcher than I was in the pen. I am afraid to make a mistake. I’m not going after the Tigers hitters, and the upshot is that not only are my knuckleballs not confounding the Tigers, they are coming in looking like beach balls.

I get Dmitri Young to ground out to end the inning. I come into the dugout, and try to forget about it. Pitching coach Mark Connor—we call him “Goose”—comes over and pats me on the back, and reminds me that plenty of pitchers get roughed up early on before settling into their rhythm.

You’ll be fine. Just keep battling, Goose says.

We get two hits but don’t score in the bottom half, and now I am back on the mound.

One hitter at a time,
I remind myself. It may be baseball’s oldest cliché, but I’ve learned that a lot of clichés gain currency for the best possible reason: they work.

The first Tigers hitter in the top of the second is Chris Shelton, a power-hitting first baseman. Ahead, 1–2, I throw another knuckler that sits up. Shelton waits. He takes a huge slugger’s cut at it and an instant later the ball is in orbit, another knuckler leaving the premises—quickly. I try not to think that I’ve already given up 1,200 feet worth of dingers. Shelton isn’t three steps out of the box when I ask the umpire for a new ball. I am not going to watch him round the bases. What would be the point? I know what his destination is. I stand on the mound and rub up the ball and look vacantly toward the sky. I can’t fathom what is happening. I turn around and look at the blank faces of my infielders, shortstop Michael Young and first baseman Mark Teixeira, and feel terrible that I am letting them down, letting the whole team down. The infield is as quiet as a library.

Forget it. Go get the next hitter,
I tell myself.
This can still be a quality start if you stop it right here.

I retire the next three guys and manage to get through a bumpy third inning, despite a long fly and two line drives. It isn’t pretty, but it is scoreless, and that constitutes progress. The first batter in the fourth is Dmitri Young. I strike him out, my first strikeout of the night. I am happy Dmitri is in the lineup. Then it is Shelton’s turn again. I go up on him, 1–2, just as I did the last time.

Don’t make the same mistake,
I tell myself.
If you miss, make sure you miss down.
If I get him, I’ll be an out away from a second straight scoreless inning. I can maybe salvage this start and show something to Jon Daniels, the general manager, and Showalter, the men who had given me this opportunity.

Except that on my next pitch I throw another beach ball up in the zone and Shelton crushes it to left, way over the fence, farther than any of the others. Goose comes out to the mound. He looks like an undertaker, only sadder. Goose knows me as well as anybody on the club. He lives in Knoxville, about three hours from me. All winter long, I’d drive to see him and throw to him, and then drive home. He wants me to succeed as much as I do, and one look at his face tells me he is feeling every bit of my pain.

Hey, R.A., let’s just take a breath right now, okay? he says. Let’s slow the game down right here. Just keep fighting. Keep grinding it out. Don’t fold up. Take a breath and give us some innings.

Goose is right in everything he says. It feels reassuring to hear his words. I take the breath. I tell myself I am going to stop the carnage here, once and for all, and get out with no further damage. The next hitter is Carlos Guillen, the shortstop. I walk him, and that brings up center fielder Craig Monroe, who swings at the first pitch, one more knuckleball that does almost nothing. Monroe hits it halfway to El Paso. Now it is 6–0, and a full-blown debacle. I could take breaths until the 162nd game and it isn’t going to change the hideous truth: the biggest start of my life has turned into the worst start of my life.

The next hitter is Marcus Thames, the left fielder. No matter what, I am not going to let him hit a knuckleball out of the park.

Instead, I throw a fastball. And he hits
that
out of the park. It is my sixty-first, and last, pitch of the night.

As Thames circles the bases, I look up into the half-filled stands and listen to boos rain down on me. It’s hard to get baseball fans in Texas to boo you, but I have done it, with a pitching line that isn’t just bad, but epically bad, tying the post-1900 record for most home runs given up in a start. My line is 3⅓ innings, 8 hits, and 7 runs. Buck is on his way out to get me now. The whole scene is completely surreal, as if I were at the center of a slow-motion highlight reel, Tigers swinging, Tigers slugging, balls flying out of the park, a home-run derby come to life. It seems as if it takes Buck a half hour to get to the mound. I stand there and wait and feel more alone than I ever have on a ball field.

It feels very, very familiar.

How long have I felt alone? How long have I been fleeing from my shame and my secrets, bobbing and weaving through life, terrified about people finding out about where I’m from and what I’ve been through?

In a strange way, as I wait to hand Buck the ball and get out of there before any more Tigers can take me over the wall, I realize that I’ve spent my three and a third innings doing the same sort of bobbing and weaving.

I’d trusted myself and pitched with conviction during my warm-up. I’d thrown good knuckleballs, and thrown them with a purpose—knuckleballs that had big movement, late movement, the kind that could make even the best hitters look silly. I was fully in the moment. And then the game started, and I hid. I pitched with fear, pitched like a wimp, doubting whether I was good enough to beat the Detroit Tigers and letting that doubt rob me of any shot I had at succeeding. As I let each pitch go that night, I had voices in my head saying,
Please, let it be a strike
and
Please don’t let them hit it.

It is no way to pitch, no way to live.

As I walk off the mound, I take in all the details of the scene around me: the vitriol of the fans; the little white lights telling the hideous truth on the scoreboard; the grim reality that I am indeed a marginal big-league pitcher. I want to believe that God has better things in store for me, and that this is not how my baseball life will end. I want to hold on to hope. I look out at the outfield walls that couldn’t contain the Tigers.