The Journey Home

by Jorge Posada

  I don’t know why some people refer to the gear we wear as catchers as “the tools of ignorance.” That’s an old-school term that you don’t hear people using much anymore, but I was always aware of it. Maybe the term means you have to be ignorant to catch, not in the way most of us use the word, “ignorant” as in stupid, but in the sense of learning to ignore a lot of things—like how much it’s going to hurt your hand to have one of Mo Rivera’s heavy cutters catch you in the palm or off-center near your thumb, or to experience a foul tip off flesh or padding. I don’t think that anyone who’s ever strapped on catcher’s gear and gotten behind the plate was ignorant of the dangers that are part of playing that position. If they were, they learned about those dangers pretty quickly in the first few live pitches. And I know one other thing for absolute sure: you can’t be ignorant—in any sense of that word—about the inner workings of the game of baseball and play the position of catcher.

  Because of all these requirements, professional baseball became, in some ways, my real education. With baseball, I took the kind of approach that someone else might have taken to become a lawyer, a doctor, or an engineer. The one difference was that, typically, as you advance in your education, you start to specialize, narrowing your focus of study; in my case, I widened my focus as I learned more by playing different positions, most notably catcher, all with the same goal—to get to the big leagues.

  Later on, as I advanced as a catcher and had to start analyzing approaches to getting hitters out, I came to see my baseball intelligence as the kind of critical thinking skill that would have helped me succeed in other areas of life had I chosen to follow a path other than baseball. The only problem was that I didn’t have the passion for anything other than baseball when I was younger. I’ve heard other people who’ve been successful talk about feeling like they were put on this planet to do a certain thing, and that’s how I felt about baseball. I’ve often felt uncomfortable in lots of other situations—social situations, talking with fans or reporters—but that was never true on a baseball field. I felt like I belonged there—even when I was learning how to be a better player.

  That attitude helped me adapt to being moved around the diamond as the Yankees experimented with me in different roles. I knew the game inside out, and it wasn’t like putting me behind the plate, or at second base, or at third or first, or in the outfield, or at designated hitter was going to throw me completely off-balance. It also didn’t affect me mentally that much because I knew I was capable of playing any of those positions. Whether I liked playing them was another story, but in some ways that didn’t matter. I was going to do whatever it took, be as flexible and accommodating to the organization’s plan as I could, as long as it meant moving up in the ranks and getting closer to the Bronx.

  That was my mind-set when I showed up for spring training in 1992. Like most of the minor leaguers, I bounced around from diamond to diamond, playing and practicing with different levels of guys based on the organization’s needs. One day I might be working with a Double A squad at second, later in the afternoon playing a game at third base with Single A guys, and finishing up by catching a Triple A pitcher’s side session.

  After we broke camp, like schoolkids going on to the next grade, most of our Oneonta team got promoted as a group (along with our manager) to Greensboro, North Carolina, where we received a whopping $50-a-month increase in salary that failed to cover the increase in our living expenses. Greensboro, a city with more than 250,000 people, wasn’t a sleepy little college town like Oneonta. That was both good and bad—there was more to do, but the cost of doing it was greater. That included rent, so Steve Phillips and I decided to live together.

  Though we didn’t have any kind of formal arrangement, it turned out that Steve and I helped one another in taking better care of our bodies. Steve had played football and baseball at the University of Kentucky, and he was as serious about physical conditioning generally and weight training specifically as any guy I’d come across. Also, at 24, Steve understood that, in baseball terms, he was an old guy and didn’t have many years left before he’d be considered too old. As a result, he was serious about every aspect of the game and wasn’t going to take any chances fooling around.

  As much as Steve took care of his body when it came to conditioning, he was like a lot of guys in not being very picky about what he ate. The processed-food and fast-food diets most of us ate back then were so poor that it’s a wonder any of us made it to the big leagues. Though I would learn a lot about the proper way to eat when I got to the big leagues, back in the minors I wasn’t a fanatic about what I consumed—I couldn’t afford to be. I missed the foods that my mom had made for me at home, but I couldn’t get any of it anywhere in North Carolina from a store or a restaurant—and Taco Bell was a poor substitute.

  Out of desperation and longing, I started to cook for myself. I was no master chef, but I could cook eggs and pasta and got very handy around the grill. I don’t think we ate many salads or vegetables, but at least we weren’t loading up on junk. I had a vague sense that what I ate had something to do with how I felt during games. Remembering meals that Steve Congwer’s mother made us and Martha Frickie’s home cooking, I realized that after those meals I felt pretty good and had pretty good days at the plate—well, at both kinds of plates, really. Eventually other guys heard about our home cooking, and we’d frequently have guys over for steaks and pasta. A couple of guys made cracks about me being “Mrs. Phillips” and how I was going to be a real catch for someone one of these days, but when I gave them the evil eye and threatened to cut off their meal privileges, that ended pretty quick.

  In addition to trying to eat better, Steve was constantly leading me through weight-based workouts. My dad was the old-school “don’t lift heavy, don’t bulk up, don’t lose your flexibility” kind of guy. That approach was somewhat backed up by the Yankees’ take on improving flexibility. We did a form of yoga, we did some variations on cardio/aerobic workouts, we used stability balls to strengthen our cores (though we didn’t have that term yet), and we did resistance exercises with various bands and weights to strengthen our shoulders. Heavy-weight workouts, like the kind football players have used forever, weren’t a part of that. But they were for Steve, and he exposed me to some concepts like “pyramids” and “reverse pyramids,” alternating upper body and lower body on different days, and things that later I’d do when working with a personal trainer.

  It makes me a bit sad to have to say this, but given the era in which I played, I’ll just confirm what I think has been obvious: I played clean and never crossed the line and took performance-enhancing drugs of any kind—from steroids to the stimulants. Given my paranoia about violating any kind of team rule or even being late for an informal meeting, you can imagine what that kind of cheating would have done to my mental state. I would never have been able to go out on the field knowing that I was doing something that gave me an unfair advantage or was either borderline illegal or was flat-out against the law. I wanted to succeed on the field, but I would never have done so by breaking the law, putting myself in any kind of jeopardy, or violating my sense of ethics or fairness. I say that at the risk of sounding judgmental. Other guys were also driven to succeed, and they made their choices. I made mine. End of story.

  Working out with Steve, I didn’t do nearly the kind of poundage and sets that he did, but I did do far higher totals of each than I’d done before. I was grateful that I was naturally flexible, a trait that my sister and I shared and that I’ve passed on to my two kids. I was stiff and sore a couple of times after beginning that new routine with Steve, but I was never as bad off as some guys who did squats for the first time and could barely make it up a set of stairs without their eyes tearing up the day after.

  Because Greensboro was larger than Oneonta and my commute to work was longer, it didn’t make sense to ride a bike anymore. I bought a used 1988 Camaro IROC (International Race of Champions), a high-performance version of Chevy’s classic. With
this car, I could pull into the players’ parking lot and not hang my head in shame. Boys being boys, a lot of our conversations were about cars and what we owned and what we’d buy when we got to the big leagues. It was good to dream, but the reality was that we were still pretty far away from the Bronx.

  Because many of us had been together the previous year, we were all pretty comfortable with each other, but my real teacher that year was our manager, Trey Hillman. Having the same guy leading the club who’d been with us in Oneonta was huge because from the start he understood what we needed as a club and as individuals. Except for a brief time with Minnesota, Trey had played his minor league career with the Indians organization, mostly as a utility guy, playing second, short, and third. He played until 1987, but by 1990, the year before I arrived in Oneonta, the Yankees already thought enough of him to make him the manager there. Trey was only 28 when he got his first job as a manager, and I think that says something about the kind of baseball man he was. He might have been only five years older than Steve Phillips, but it seemed like he was a dozen years older. He commanded that kind of respect and carried himself with authority. That doesn’t mean that he was a hard-ass, but he knew what he wanted from us, knew the game, treated us like adults, and expected us to respond like adults.

  Trey was one of the guys who really made me into a Yankee. He was tough on me, but he taught me a lot, especially about focus. As much as I was used to playing the game throughout the year, I had to learn to focus all the time—not just during the 144 days when we had games but every day we worked as a team—and Trey helped me tremendously with that.

  Whenever my focus slipped, whether on or off the field, Trey was there. One night in mid-June we were back home after a road trip. We were scheduled to play the next night, and a bunch of guys got together at a local bar to hang out, unwind, and have a few drinks. Steve and I were both there. We had a midnight curfew, but that was okay. Who was going to track us down? At one point I looked up, and there was Trey. We made eye contact briefly, and then I saw him reach into his pocket and take out a pen and a little notebook. I looked at my watch and saw that it was 1:00 A.M. Busted.

  The next day Steve and I walked into Trey’s office before the game. He was sitting behind his little desk reading something. Without a word, we walked up to his desk, laid down $50 each to pay our fines, and turned to walk away. We heard Trey laughing, and then he said, “The kids thank you.” Trey always took our fine money and donated it to a local charity.

  I liked how Trey handled that situation—he had us, we knew it, and nothing needed to be said about it. We manned up and paid up, and he appreciated it.

  Similarly, I still remember when I failed that year in Greensboro to live up to what I expected of myself. I don’t know how, but my alarm failed me and I overslept. Steve had gotten up early to work out, and I would have missed the team bus entirely if someone hadn’t knocked on the door of my apartment to get me. I heard that knock and I was instantly wide awake and scrambling to get dressed and out the door. Trey fined me $100, which was huge considering how little I earned each month, and he reminded me, much as my dad had always done, that the little things matter. How people perceived me mattered, he said. I could just shrug it off and say, “Hey, everybody oversleeps,” but that would be more than just a comment on how I slept. It could be interpreted that I didn’t care—that I was too lazy to set an alarm, too unreliable to take care of the little things, or so much inside my own head that I didn’t care about the team.

  Honestly, he scared the crap out of me by saying all of that, but it was a good reminder. He also let me know in talking to me that way that he cared about me and what happened to me and my career. He was like that with all the guys. It was kind of like a big brother relationship in some ways, but he was also like a father to us in that he knew that how we performed reflected on him. He wanted to advance in his career, and he was going to do that if we were successful. I didn’t know this at the time, but his first year in Oneonta he managed that team to a 52-26 record, or a .667 winning percentage. That’s amazing to me now: you get a bunch of guys who don’t know one another, who have never played together before, who didn’t have a spring training together, and you get them to perform at that level? That’s good coaching and managing.

  Not that he was even-tempered all the time. At one point during the season in Greensboro we got beat pretty bad by the Asheville Tourists at their place. It wasn’t that the score was so bad—we lost 5–3 or something like that—but we wasted a bunch of scoring opportunities. From the time I got into the organization, the Yankees just preached and preached and preached to us about having good at-bats and making our outs count for something. In that game, we didn’t do that, failing several times to move runners along or get a sacrifice fly to drive in a run.

  I could see that Trey was steaming when we walked past him into the clubhouse after the game. He sat there with his notebook, writing furiously. He didn’t come into the clubhouse right away, so we were in the showers and all of a sudden the helmet bag came skittering into the middle of the shower room. A few seconds later, Trey came in, fully clothed, and even in the steam and spray of the showers I could see that he was the hottest thing in there. He pointed at the helmets lying on the floor.

  “Everybody grab one.”

  With shampoo foaming in our hair, we all looked at one another in shock, everyone unwilling to make the first move.

  “Put ’em on!” Trey shouted. His voice got really high and pinched, and in that room with all the tile it sounded even more piercing.

  We each grabbed a helmet and put it on. Trey, who was standing in the entrance to the showers, leaned over and then grabbed a bat bag and slid it into the room.

  “Everybody grab a fucking bat.”

  I knew better than to say anything, but I was thinking that we didn’t want the bats to warp. Still, I did as I was told, just like the rest of the guys.

  The next thing I knew the table with our postgame meal on it was skidding into the showers, shedding cold cuts and rolls all over the floor. I looked into the clubhouse, where the guys who had been eating a few seconds earlier sat chewing with shocked expressions on their faces.

  “Do you know what a two-strike approach is?” Trey’s eyes were bugging out of his head at that point.

  We all mumbled that we did, and that really got to him: “What did you say!”

  We all mumbled a little louder, but with the water coming down and hissing out of the showerheads, we would have had to shout, and to be honest, most of us were trying not to laugh.

  “You’ve got to choke up on the fucking bat! Choke up! Show me!”

  At that point, I looked around the room—big mistake. I saw us all standing there buck naked, helmets on, and bats in our hands. Then I saw Lew Hill, who was a funny dude and had been stuck in the South Atlantic for a couple of years already. Because of the water and the shampoo and his helmet, bubbles were coming out of the vent holes in the top of his helmet. I tried to stop myself, but I couldn’t.

  Trey stepped toward me, but the shower spray kept him from getting too close.

  “Hey, what the fuck is so funny about the way we lost?”

  I said, “I’m not laughing about the game. I’m laughing at Lew.”

  “Why are you laughing at Lew?”

  “His helmet is making bubbles.”

  “Not that funny.” He shook his head as he said that and bent toward us, squinting through the steam and looking like a crazed chicken with his head bobbing up and down.

  By that point everybody but Trey was laughing. I could see that he was getting angrier and angrier, but all he kept saying was, in contrast to the obvious, “It’s not funny. It’s not fucking funny!”

  The more he said it, the harder we laughed.

  He turned and said, “You guys are not leaving. None of you. Sit your asses in this clubhouse for the next 90 minutes and talk baseball. And I mean talk baseball. No other bullshit allowed.”

 
; With that, he left.

  While we took off our helmets and bagged the bats, we all tried to figure out how we were going to talk baseball for 90 minutes. After we’d showered and gotten dressed, we did sit on our folding chairs and say a few things about how we had to start playing better. A couple of guys made cracks about how we better if for no other reason than to preserve Trey’s sanity. When the hour and a half was up, we opened the clubhouse exit door, but the bus was gone.

  Asheville was a great place, kind of hippy trendy but with some good restaurants and lots of spots to hear live music. As the team’s nickname indicates, it was also a place that a lot of tourists visited and that meant that lots of talent—pretty girls—could always be found. Missing out on an opportunity to be out there was a huge loss. We settled back into the clubhouse, some of the guys lying on the floor, others sprawled in front of their locker. A few minutes later, we heard our bus pulling up. Steve said that, instead of scrambling out the door and piling onto the bus in hopes of salvaging some of the night, we should all “be cool. Look contrite.” Then he looked at me and said, “That means look sad.”

  Everybody cracked up, but quickly regained their serious looks.

  Trey came in, his arms loaded with paper bags from what smelled like a barbecue place. Still looking pissed, he snarled, “Sit your asses down and eat.”

  We all pulled up chairs and waited like schoolboys for our teacher to tell us it was okay. The room was silent. Normally, Trey would eat in his office, but he sat down with us.

  Then, keeping a straight face, he said, “Baseball. Baseball. Baseball. Baseball. Baseball. Baseball.”

  He couldn’t keep himself from laughing, “What kind of stupid shit was I thinking? Let’s eat. At least I know your hands are clean.” Then he looked at me and said, “Go ahead, Bubbles. Dig in.”