The Journey Home

by Jorge Posada

  I watched as the veins in his temple pulsed and his complexion reddened until he looked like he wanted to toss the bike across the garage. Sensing his frustration, I started my demonstration again. Instead of letting Jorge finish the job I’d started, I pressed the tire back onto the rim and told him, “Now you do it. I’ll be back.” I left him to the task, figuring, without me there, some of the pressure would be off him. Before I closed the door to the house I said, “Take your time. We’ll go when you’re ready.”

  What I didn’t tell my son in that lesson was that those high-pressure tubes were kind of like my dad and me. He had high expectations for me. He was strict and expected me to stay within a narrow band of proper behavior—how I dressed, how I played the game, how I performed in school, how I spoke to my elders, and all the rest that went into living under the rules of his regime. “My house, my rules” was something I heard quite a bit growing up. The pressure of those expectations was so high that, when I needed to be free of them, I sometimes popped—and not in a slow leak but in a quick release, like when I shot that neighbor’s house. It didn’t happen a lot, but because I was usually so well behaved and so firmly under my dad’s control, it was even more noticeable when I did pop. The tough part for me to deal with, both then and to an extent later on, was that, when I did something to remove the pressure I felt to excel, it seemed like the expectations built up even more and even more things went wrong, until I finally felt like I couldn’t put up with it anymore. It seemed like every time I decided to take a chance and defy my dad’s rules, things went way wrong. Not all the time, but often enough.

  Although I didn’t understand it at the time, this was another way my dad was preparing me to be a big league ballplayer: all those expectations he had for me made me feel like I was supposed to behave like an adult. He wanted me to be mature, and maybe more advanced for my age than I was ready to be—like having me switch-hit when I felt I wasn’t ready to. I can’t help but think of that time my dad had me level off the backyard in the light of these kinds of expectations. Sure, he was training my hands to be strong enough to grip the wood of the shovel, but more than that, he was showing me what he expected from me as a person and the standards that he expected me to meet. Most parents I know, if they wanted to have their yard transformed like that, would call in a landscaping crew to do the work. A bunch of adults would come and do it. But that was not his way—simply getting the work done was not the point.

  Every summer after I turned 13 I had to paint the ornamental grillwork around our house, a task that also terrorized my days out of school. Because iron and humidity don’t work well with paint, it was constantly peeling. Our sidewalk frequently looked like Fifth Avenue after a victory parade, speckled with flecks of paint. My job was to clean up the sidewalk and repaint the iron bars.

  I hated that job.

  It wasn’t as demanding physically as hauling dirt, but it was still nasty work. I had to take a sheet of sandpaper and a metal scraper and go after the iron bars to smooth them out. The paint dust and the rust that I kicked up clogged my nose and throat; I scraped my knuckles raw trying to get into every tiny crevice and curve of those pieces. The ones that were spiraled like a corkscrew were the absolute worst, a work of the same Devil my parents thought sometimes urged me to misbehave. I think it was down in the fires of hell that El Diablo forged those pieces of iron. Painting them wasn’t much fun either. A lot of what I had sanded off clung to the old paint. At first, I didn’t bother to wipe it all down, and I’d just slap the new paint on, covering the dust and flecks. Since some of the paint would glob onto the iron and some would cling to the brush, even if I painted over an area that was free of debris, the painted surface would be pebbled and bumpy.

  I didn’t really care. At least the surfaces were all black and no rust was showing through. No bare spots were good, right? Unfortunately, my dad would come out and do a daily inspection of my work and point out all the flaws in what I considered to be the finished sections.

  “Sand that again. I want it smoooooth,” my dad would say, drawing out the word to make his point and making me want to put the point of the scraper to my neck and end my suffering.

  I learned my lesson pretty quickly about rushing through the job. If I thought that sanding and scraping old paint was difficult, trying to get the fresh stuff off was another kind of torment.

  Once, when I was complaining to Manuel and Ernesto about the tortures of my labor, Manuel suggested using a stripper.

  After a couple of jokes about what a stripper did, I got the picture—let chemicals do the work.

  When my dad came home at lunch, he took me out for a tour of my work. He pursed his lips and nodded. “Mucho mejor.”

  I knew it was looking better, but I was interested in it looking better faster.

  I told him all that I knew about paint strippers and tried to make my case that the modern way was the best way. I’d barely gotten a few words into my sales pitch when he silenced me. He held up both of his hands, “Tus manos. Que van a hacer el trabajo.”

  It figured. My hands would have to do the work, not some chemical concoction.

  And so it was that every summer I’d battle the elements, with my dad fanatically clinging to the idea that the old way was the right way. All I know is that the steel bristles of that scraper couldn’t have irritated me more or done more damage than I did gritting my teeth and cursing under my breath, inhaling the by-products of my sweaty efforts. To this day, I can’t go into a home supply store and not tear up when I see a can of Sherwin-Williams paint. It’s the logo of a can of paint dripping over the earth that makes me queasy. I felt like I’d done the same thing all those years—covered all 196.9 million square miles of the earth’s surface with my sanding and painting, summer after summer, until the t in the word “paint” was no longer visible.

  My hands had to do old-school work in another way as well. When I was first learning to hit and later to switch-hit, I used an aluminum bat most of the time. That all changed in 1983, when I was 13. I was still playing club baseball primarily. I was forced to switch schools because I wasn’t earning good enough grades at the American Military Academy. I didn’t really mind. It was a long bus ride there and getting up at 6:00 A.M. and getting home at 6:30 P.M. after practice was wearing me out.

  It’s funny to think of it now, but even back then I was more concerned about my dad switching me from an aluminum bat to a wooden bat than I was about switching schools. I didn’t think of having to leave AMA as a failure, though it was just that. I didn’t have failing grades, but I didn’t achieve at the level that everyone wanted me to or I needed to.

  In retrospect, I was lucky to have a father who came down hard on me when my grades fell short of what they needed to be for me to participate in sports but who never took the privilege of playing sports away from me. My dad wanted me to focus on doing the things I was good at. I played a bit of soccer and basketball at school and at the club—I wasn’t very good at soccer but really liked hoops and was decent at it—but eventually he told me to give them up completely to focus on baseball. I didn’t mind that much at all.

  I wound up attending a Catholic school, La Merced, for seventh through ninth grades. La Merced lived up to its Spanish name: it was a bit of mercy for me. My mom had learned to drive by then, so I didn’t have to get up before sunrise to catch a bus. Also, classes let out at 1:30, a full two hours ahead of the military school. In comparison, attending La Merced was like going on vacation. However, I did have to pay a bit of a price: my aluminum bat privileges were revoked.

  To anyone who has ever played the game over the last 40 years, an aluminum bat is either a blessing or a curse. If you have sensitive ears—and keep in mind that I was still called Dumbo on occasion back then—the piercing sound of a ping off an Easton aluminum bat can give you either chills of pleasure or waves of pain. I grew up with aluminum bats, so I was accustomed to the sound and, more important, to the feel. The ball just jumps off those th
ings, and I was using them in the era when those bats were at their hottest. Eventually, because of how fast the ball came off aluminum bats, organizations like the NCAA got bat-makers to tone them down for fear that someone was going to get killed by a well-struck ball.

  With that in mind, I think you can understand why I was upset with my dad for taking away my aluminum bats and requiring me to use wooden bats only. The way I saw it, I was going to be at a disadvantage compared to other players. Of course, there was a method to his madness—which, once again, I can only appreciate looking back.

  As a scout, my dad had heard lots of stories about guys who put up big numbers in the amateur ranks but couldn’t make the transition to using wooden bats when they turned pro. My dad didn’t go into too much detail in explaining why I had to use wood. He simply said that big leaguers used them. I wanted to be a big leaguer, so I should too. I understood that, and it wasn’t really that hard of a habit to break, but I did notice a difference in how the ball came off my bat. Part of that was due to the fact that the sweet spot on an aluminum bat is larger than it is on a wooden bat. Depending on who you talk to, the difference can be as much as 100 percent—six inches for an aluminum bat and three inches for a wooden bat.

  What that meant in practical terms was that I had to really groove my swing, fine-tune my eye, and develop greater concentration in order to square up a ball and hit it well. I couldn’t be lazy with my swing or my approach at the plate. I understood all that intellectually, but emotionally it was hard for me to deal with not producing the kind of results that I sometimes saw other, less talented hitters producing. For some adults that transition was tough; I was still just a kid and my dad expected me to make it.

  I understood the game well, and from the bench I’d watch my teammates—or my opponents from my position at shortstop—hitting balls off their fists, off the end of the bat, and driving them into the outfield for hits. If I hit the ball off those same spots on a wooden bat, I’d ground out weakly or hit a little humpbacked liner that wasn’t struck hard enough to make a dent in a fielder’s glove.

  I don’t have access to my batting statistics from back then to verify this point, but I know that based on never being named most valuable, most outstanding, most improved, or most anything until late in my youth, except most likely to bleed—I never wore batting gloves and took so many swings that I shredded the skin on my hands—those bats were a blessing and a curse to me. I understood the economic need for aluminum bats. They were more expensive, but they didn’t break. I was fortunate that my dad had access to wooden bats, and I never really gave that access much thought. He told me to use them. He provided them for me, and when I broke one, I always had at least a couple of others on hand to use. I knew that money didn’t grow on trees, but bats did.

  When I did travel to the DR to visit family, or later to play in some tournaments, I saw how lucky I was. Some of the teams we played seemed to have just one or two wooden or aluminum bats, and all the guys on the team used them. My bats were mine. It wasn’t like I wouldn’t have let someone else use one, and a few guys did mess around with them during batting practice, but no one wanted to have the disadvantage of a wooden bat, so for the most part they left my bats alone.

  In the end, having a wooden bat was just another way I was going to stand out as different from the other guys, another sign that I was the son of a scout, a boy with expectations heaped on him. At first, I felt privileged to have a father who worked for a major league baseball team. I was able to get T-shirts, pants, and uniform tops from the Blue Jays. I wore them to practice but nowhere else. I wore the same khakis and polo shirts uniform to school as before, and off the field I didn’t wear any team logo gear. That was especially true with hats. Even though baseball hats had become a popular fashion item, I seldom wore them other than on the field.

  While I was proud of these clothes, they also pointed out another painful part of my reality: my dad was a scout while I was struggling to be a good ballplayer, sometimes finding myself stuck out in right field because I couldn’t make the plays anywhere in the infield. Everybody knew my dad and knew that I was his kid. So when I didn’t do well, it was always “Jorge Posada’s kid,” “the scout’s kid,” who didn’t do well. Everybody looked at me and figured that, given who my dad was, I should have been all-league, all-star, all the time. I wasn’t. I got really frustrated a lot of the time, and my dad never really consoled me or encouraged me; instead, he’d tell me that I had to work harder. That’s great advice to give, but back then it wasn’t always what I wanted to hear. I needed to hear it, but I didn’t like it.

  Just because I wanted to be better at the game didn’t mean I liked having to work harder to improve. Nobody likes having to work that hard; you do it because you have to, and when you see some positive changes, you like the fact that your hard work is paying off and it makes the work easier. I can’t say that when my dad told me to take 100 swings at the chain-link fence to practice getting the barrel of the bat out in front and to strengthen my hands and arms, I was laughing and shaking my head at how much of a pleasure it was going to be to do that. I enjoyed getting some of my frustrations out, but I can’t say that beating on that fence was fun. It was work, and a part of me, a big part of me, wished that I didn’t have to work so hard. I wanted to play better, and that took work. It’s great when the work of baseball combines with the pleasure of playing it, but for me, at least until the late stages of my high school and American Legion career, there was a lot more work than play to it.

  Not only did my dad show me just how much of the game is an actual job, but I also benefited from his involvement in baseball in another way. He didn’t play baseball any longer, but he was still playing and coaching softball. At the club, and against the other clubs, my dad played nine-inch softball in a league with somewhat modified rules. It wasn’t slow-pitch, where the pitcher lobs the ball up there with a high arc; it also wasn’t fast-pitch, like you see when women play in the Olympics, where they throw hard risers and that kind of thing. In my dad’s softball league, they did pitch underhand, but most of the guys threw a kind of knuckleball that moved around. The ball never really got much above the head of the batter as it came in. Still, those guys could make the ball move pretty good.

  My dad was a good pitcher, and my first experiences with catching took place outside our house on the sidewalk when he’d use me as his practice catcher for the club competitions. Eventually my dad progressed to forming and playing for a team that used the fast-pitch rules—the big windmill windup like Jennie Finch and others would use. That team competed all around the island and was made up of some really good athletes, including a few ex-professional baseball players. Nelson Pedraza was the shortstop, and Eddie Santos batted cleanup and played right field. So this wasn’t a beer league for guys with big guts hanging over their bellies who could only do one thing—belt the ball a long way. In fast-pitch, even though the ball is bigger, you have to play small ball—make contact, hit behind runners, bunt, and that sort of thing.

  When I was 15, my dad recruited me to play on his tournament team. They needed a catcher because their star pitcher, Esteban Ramallo, could really, really bring it. In fast-pitch softball, the pitcher’s mound is 46 feet away from home plate. That’s 14½ feet closer than it is in baseball. With his windup moving him toward the batter, the pitcher releases the ball closer to 42 or so feet away. That doesn’t give a hitter a lot of time to react.

  Esteban Ramallo threw in the mid- to high 80s. It was hard to catch him because with that underhand delivery, it was like the ball was coming out of his midsection. It came out of his hand low and stayed low on a flat plane rather than make any kind of eye-level change. That made it hard to track. The first few times I caught him I was more like a soccer or hockey goalie—I was just trying to keep the ball from getting past me. Plus, a 6-inch softball’s bigger circumference made it hard to get the ball to nestle in the glove.

  I liked the challenge of catching fast-pi
tch, though, and it was cool to be playing with and against adults. Facing those pitchers, even with an aluminum bat in my hand, I had to shorten my stroke and really focus on making solid contact. That was especially important because when we got into tournament play I batted leadoff. I managed to have some good games, as did the team, but we fell short of winning the championship.

  Still, the experience was great, and I learned a lot. It’s a huge advantage for developing players to compete against the best competition possible. It’s hard psychologically when you struggle against older guys, but when you do succeed you get an extra dose of confidence. Also, your physical skills inevitably improve when you manage to go up against players who are older, bigger, and faster. I’ve heard a lot of athletes, football players especially, say that the transition from high school to college, or from college to the NFL, was difficult because the game seemed so much faster. The same is true for a lot of baseball players when they advance: the pitchers seem to throw harder from one level to the next. At a certain point, though, what makes it more difficult to hit isn’t so much how hard guys throw but their ability to throw off-speed and breaking balls for strikes.

  Playing those softball games and hitting and catching guys like Esteban helped to sharpen my skills. I also enjoyed watching my dad coach and play. I’d seen my dad react with joy when he beat my butt at Ping-Pong, but when he was out on the field competing at softball, and to some extent on the basketball court, he seemed transformed. He took it seriously, but there was a pleasure to that seriousness that I could identify with. He was having fun. Competing was fun. Winning was fun. All the things he told me to do—work hard, hustle, find a competitive edge—weren’t just things he said, they were things that he could do. It was like having your teacher demonstrate that he didn’t just have some knowledge of a subject but was skilled at it too.