Wherever I Wind Up (34 page)

Henry Blanco and the rest of the team rush up to congratulate me, and the Citi Field crowd stands in appreciation. I don’t do well with being celebrated. I’ve always wanted to resist it or at least deflect it somehow, probably because of all the shame I’ve dragged around all these years, and not feeling entitled. But I’m getting better at it, and can at least take in some of the praise. More than anything, I feel grateful for the opportunity God gave me to shine and for feeling as though I just might belong here.

As I walk through the tunnel into the clubhouse, I have a flashback to my only other major-league shutout, in Comerica Park against the Tigers. I was pitching for the Rangers and Alex Rodriguez was the shortstop. When ARod came up to congratulate me afterward, he said, You have me to thank for that.

What do you mean? I asked.

I called every pitch from shortstop, ARod said, explaining that he relayed signs to our catcher that day, Einar Diaz.

Well, thank you, I told ARod.

The next time out, I gave up six hits and six earned runs in a 9–2 loss to the Royals.

I asked ARod after the game if I had him to thank for that too.

No, I didn’t call the pitches tonight, he said.

We stay over .500 until the middle of September before a 5–10 finish in the final fifteen games consigns us to fourth place in the National League East and a 79–83 record. Even without a pennant race, I am more intense with my starts than ever before, because I know I’m pitching for a contract—and my future. I’ve been a vagabond for a long time and I’m ready for it to stop. The only way that happens is if I prove to the Mets that I’m someone they need to bring back. And I accomplish that by finishing strong, and treating every start as if it were my own personal game seven, no matter what the standings say.

My last start of the year is against the Milwaukee Brewers, in the second game of a doubleheader at Citi Field. I go 7 strong innings, give up 6 hits and 1 run, and lose. I finish the year with an 11–9 record and a 2.84 ERA. It’s the most victories I’ve had in a season, and the lowest ERA I’ve had in a season by far. I want to believe it’s ample justification for the Mets to re-up me for a year through the arbitration process, but when talks begin between Bo McKinnis and the Mets, it quickly becomes clear that a two-year agreement is within reach. I wind up agreeing to a deal for $7.8 million over two years. There is only one downside to it.

It means I have to get a physical, my first full baseball physical since the one I had with Dr. Conway in 1996—the one that launched me on the road to orthopedic infamy, and cost me my first-round offer.

This time the physical is with Dr. Struan Coleman at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York. I couldn’t have been more anxious that morning if I’d spent it dodging taxicabs in midtown.

I don’t like my history with physicals.

It’s going to be okay. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with you, Bo McKinnis reassures me. It’s going to be routine.

Bo joins me at the hospital and stays for the ninety minutes it takes Dr. Coleman to check out my arm. I have an MRI and a variety of other tests. I want to believe it’s going to be fine, but didn’t I think that in 1996?

Yes, I did.

I thank Dr. Coleman, and Bo and I go on our way. A few hours later, Sandy Alderson calls Bo.

Everything checked out fine, Sandy says, so I’ll get the contract out to you to sign.

Bo calls me right away.

You passed the physical and now it’s time to sign your contract, Bo tells me.

I feel immediate and immense relief. Finally, I can begin to appreciate the financial security I’m about to have. I may be well short of the Jeter/ARod income bracket, but the contract I’m about to sign is ten times the amount that I lost when the Rangers pulled their offer. It seems miraculous to me, the grace of God at work in my life again.

And with a fourth child on the way in spring training, the timing is propitious.

Still, for me, the greatest payoff of all is to be wanted. I don’t have to go shopping for a new club or go through a dog and pony show to convince somebody that I am better than my numbers. I don’t have to prove anything—because I’ve already done it, across 174 innings and 27 starts. And that means that, for the first time in fifteen years, I do not have to go to spring training to audition for a job.

I already have a job.

I belong.

For now, anyway, I’ve changed not only the perception that I am nothing but a 4A pitcher but also the perception that you can’t trust the knuckleball or the people who throw them. This is exactly what I’ve been praying for for years. I wouldn’t pretend to know how God works, why things happen the way they do. I just know that God is good, and He has blessed me abundantly.

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2011

NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE

Toward the end of the 2011 season, as the batting race moved toward its conclusion, I wore a bold silk-screened workout T-shirt with José Reyes’s picture on the front. I wanted to show José how much I was pulling for him. The shirt did its job well, but it must be retired now, because as sad as I am about it, José is no longer the New York Mets’ shortstop. He is now playing that position for the Miami Marlins, a club with a new name, a new ballpark, a new manager, a new $106 million leadoff hitter, and apparently new access to a pile of money.

It hurts a ton to lose a talent like José. It hurts even more to lose him to a division rival.

I can’t say that I am surprised about it, though. With the club’s financial issues and the money José figured to command, I thought all along that we were long shots to keep him. When I found out the Marlins started courting him at 12:01 a.m. on the first day he was officially on the market, I became less optimistic still. Everybody wants to feel wanted, and although I don’t doubt that Sandy Alderson would’ve loved to have held on to José, I also don’t doubt that the Marlins’ full-throttle courtship helped seal the deal.

As I write this, Ruben Tejada is slated to be our shortstop. He’s a promising young player who did a lot of good things last year, and I believe he’s going to be a solid big-league player. But I don’t expect him to be José Reyes, and nobody else should, either. That would be expecting me to be Roy Halladay.

A player with José’s talent comes along once every twenty-five years, if that often. There are legitimate questions about his durability and about the prudence of giving a six-year deal to a twenty-nine-year-old shortstop whose game is built around speed. Is there a chance that the Marlins will wind up regretting the deal? Sure there is. That takes nothing from the kind of player the Marlins are getting: a one-man energy plant and a breathtaking athlete.

I could give you fifty José Reyes highlights in the two years we were teammates, but one that comes to mind first occurred on my opening-day start at Citi Field last April, against the Nationals. In the top of the fifth, with the bases loaded, Rick Ankiel hit a missile up the middle that looked headed into center field for a two-run single. José moved quickly to his left, snared the ball, touched second, and threw to first for the double play. End of threat. End of inning. José made this play all the time, and made it look easy. He probably saved me ten runs last year all by himself.

Players come and go so often in baseball that you get used to saying good-bye. Kevin Slowey, Mark Teixeira, Joe Nathan, Carlos Beltrán … I could go on and on about the players who I really enjoyed being teammates with who I wound up saying good-bye to. Now José Reyes, as good a two-way shortstop as I’ve ever seen, is added to the list. I wish him all the best when he’s not playing the New York Mets.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

UNBROKEN MOMENTS

A
parking spot. As of February 15, 2011, I have my very own parking spot. It’s hard to believe that this is revving my engine the way it is, but what can I tell you? Number 43 is written on the asphalt between two white lines that are fifteen feet long and ten feet apart. The lines don’t just demarcate any space. They demarcate
my
space. I am not far from Frankie Rodriguez’s number 62 and his black Lamborghini, a high-end neighborhood to be in in the Digital Domain players’ lot in Port St. Lucie, Florida.

It took the better part of two decades, but I have my own big-league space. I ride a bicycle to the park most days, but that is completely irrelevant. I have a place that is mine. I am not a guy just passing through or living on the minor-league fringe. I belong. What a wonderful concept.

Right from the start, this year isn’t about surviving for me. It’s about wanting more. It’s about thriving, and being trustworthy. This is where my journey is taking me. I want to prove that I am trustworthy not just as a pitcher but also as a husband and a father and a believer, and one has everything to do with the others. Because if I have it in me to be fully present in one realm of my life, I know it will overflow into the other realms. The only way to prove it is by showing up every day and being someone who is worthy of trust.

Trust is a big issue around the Mets, for reasons that go far beyond one pitcher’s search for himself. The club has an acclaimed new general manager, Sandy Alderson, and well-regarded new manager, Terry Collins, but the blaring headlines all spring long are about the Mets supposedly being on the brink of financial ruin after being scammed out of hundreds of millions of dollars by the jailed Ponzi king Bernie Madoff. Beyond that, the trustee in charge of the Madoff case is suing Mets ownership for hundreds of millions more on the belief that the Mets owners, Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz, should’ve been suspicious about their rate of return. The wreckage Madoff left behind is unfathomable—lives ruined, families wiped out, one of his own sons taking his own life—but neither the scandal nor its possible impact on the Mets is ever broached to us, the players, not even with a drive-by, “Just keep doing your job, guys” sort of comment.

We hear nothing, and because ballplayers are traditionally good at sticking their heads in the sand anyway, the matter doesn’t infiltrate our daily lives in the least. We don’t ponder what the Wilpons knew when we stretch, and we don’t discuss the loan the club got from Major League Baseball to meet their short-term expenses. We’re deep in our diamond-shaped cocoon. It doesn’t mean we’re all a bunch of spoiled brats; it just means that our little palm-treed corner of paradise is not easily wobbled, even though some black ballplayer humor—which is as old as the game itself—surfaces from time to time:

Maybe we’ll be staying at Motel 6s on the road this year.

I hope they didn’t have our per diem money with Bernie.

Is it true David Wright’s going to be piloting our charter?

I want to believe that the truth will come out, but until it does, I am going to put my energy into my own truth-seeking … and continue to work on my knuckler.

NOT HAVING TO PITCH
my way onto the team makes an even bigger difference than I thought it would. It frees me up to experiment with some things, one of which is a superslow knuckleball. I throw most of my knuckleballs between 75 and 80 miles per hour, though I can bump it up into the low eighties if I want. Dan Warthen and I agree that if hitters have to be on the lookout for the same pitch at 58 or 60, it might be an effective weapon. The challenge is getting the release down without telegraphing it so I have the element of surprise in my favor. It takes me several weeks to get comfortable enough with it to the point that I can use it in a game.

When we break camp and drive south to Miami to get 2011 started, I’m a pitcher with deeply conflicted feelings. On the one hand, I’m pumped to start the third game of the season. On the other hand, I have enough fear and anxiety to fill the Grand Ole Opry. It’s the usual garbage in my head, fears that I won’t be good enough, that I am destined to implode and that I’ll be back in Buffalo by nightfall. (Not that worrying is an original Dickey concept: “The pressure never lets up. Doesn’t matter what you did yesterday. That’s history. It’s tomorrow that counts. So you worry all the time. It never ends. Lord, baseball is a worrying thing.” That’s a quote from Stan Coveleski, a Hall of Famer.)