The Journey Home

by Jorge Posada

  Fortunately, the name didn’t stick, but the incident did help bring the team together. Trey would be my manager again the next year in High A at Prince William, and though I didn’t always understand his methods, over time he understood me better than I understood myself. A few times he called me into his office before or after a game and started to give me a really hard time, calling me out, and then he’d say, “You want to hit me, don’t you? I can see it. You’re so pissed at me, you want to take a swing at me.” He was playing around with me to make his point.

  “No, I don’t want to hit you.” The last thing I wanted to do was get released for punching a manager.

  “Well, you should want to. You should be pissed off. You know you play better when you’re pissed at the world, don’t you? Use that energy the right way, and you’ll be better off.”

  He was right. My whole life, even though I didn’t really know what this English expression meant, I’d had a “chip on my shoulder.” I’d also eventually hear it described as “having a bit of the red ass,” or what we Spanish-speaking guys call “encojonado.” Some guys can play with the kind of cool that Derek Jeter exhibited—he was a fierce competitor, but you couldn’t really tell it from how he carried himself. Some guys have to let their emotions show, and it took me a while to realize that if I kept all that passion and all that “I’ll show you” energy bottled up, I wasn’t as effective as I was when I let it out in proper ways. That was one of the things that Trey tried to get me to understand—how to channel that energy and passion and anger instead of letting it explode uncontrollably. That was tough to do, and it would take me a long time to learn how. I’m not sure I’ve ever mastered the art of it.

  Another part of my baseball education was reading a book that several guys recommended to me. H. A. Dorfman, a sports psychologist, wrote The Mental Side of Baseball: A Guide to Peak Performance. It was loaded with practical tips and stories from major and minor league ballplayers. I could relate to them because the situations those guys faced were ones that I had faced. It was good to know that other players struggled with self-doubt and frustration. Knowing that guys who made it to where I wanted to be still felt some of those same fears and anxieties was really helpful.

  That wasn’t the only reason, though, why I needed to read the book. Of the 101 games I played in that year, I was at third base for five of them and caught 41. In the rest I served as the designated hitter. I think my fielding stats at third base say a lot—I had four errors in those five games. A lot of that was mental. I wasn’t playing the field regularly, and I wanted to. So when I got in the game I put too much pressure on myself and didn’t make some routine plays. That’s why I needed to read that book. Behind the plate, I was okay. I had six passed balls and one error in those 41 games. Because I was new to the position and expectations for my performance weren’t as high, somehow I relaxed more. This may sound a little strange, but I was thinking so much about having to focus that the thinking got in the way of being able to actually focus and perform.

  The place where I felt most at home that year was the batter’s box, and I had decent numbers, batting .277 with 13 home runs and 58 RBI in 339 at-bats. I was striking out a bit more than I would have liked, with 87 of them, but I was still taking a good approach, and I managed to walk 58 times. I didn’t see much of a difference in the quality of the pitchers we faced in A compared to low A, and the lights and batter’s eye weren’t any different either. The nearly 40-point jump in my average over what I’d hit in Oneonta was mainly due to relaxing a bit and having more at-bats.

  I don’t know if being a DH the majority of the season helped or not. Yes, I did get to focus more on my offense, but not being out on the field made me feel less a part of the game. It also gave me a lot of time—in some ways too much time—to spend thinking about my last or next at-bat. It was a bit of a struggle to get to the point where I could really embrace the idea that one at-bat, or one pitch in an at-bat, really had no relation to any of the others, that they were separate opportunities. By that I mean that the result of that pitch or at-bat wasn’t tied to what happened before it. Pitches were tied together in how a pitcher worked to set me up, or in the approach I took depending on the count—but not in the result.

  Toward the end of the season, what seemed like a relatively minor footnote in Yankees history came about when a young player I’d never heard of before, a guy named Derek Jeter, played with us. Our third baseman, Tim Cooper, got hurt, so Richard Lantrip had to move from short to third. We needed a shortstop, so they were bringing in this new guy. I heard a few guys talking before game time, and I kept hearing, “Jeter’s coming.” I’d heard that he was the first guy the Yankees selected back in June, so I was eager to see him. Then he showed up, and I was like, “That’s a Jeter?”

  This guy shows up, and he’s about six feet four inches tall, and he can’t weigh more than 150 pounds. He was so tall and skinny, and he wore these ankle braces on both legs and high-top shoes. Was he afraid that his skinny little legs would collapse? And the guy didn’t know how to wear a baseball hat. He tilted it up in the front and down low in the back and had this “gosh, gee whiz, fellas” expression on his face like he was the new kid at school looking for the cafeteria or where to meet his mom for a ride home. I was hating on how he looked.

  What was the big deal? The first game he got in, I was DH-ing, so I got to see him from the bench. Ground ball up the middle on the right side of second base, he gloves it, does a spinderella, and fires the ball for a strike to just get the runner. That was pretty good, I thought. Next inning, a ball deep in the hole to his left. Backhand. Plant. Laser to first. Okay, he can go in both directions. He struck out his first time, and I thought, Decent glove, no stick. Back to hating on him.

  Next time up.

  Yard. Those spindly legs got him around the base paths okay on his home-run trot, with dainty little clouds of dust coming up from his Bambi paws as the ball sailed over the fence. I thought we should give him the silent treatment when he came back to the dugout, but I slapped his hand, being careful not to hit the delicate little guy too hard.

  It didn’t take someone with a baseball IQ like I had to see that the guy was going to be pretty special. He just needed someone to dress him better and tell him to wipe his runny nose. He also needed someone to tell him that he should be very careful who he chose for friends. In time, payback for all the jokes he made at my expense was going to be tough.

  I wouldn’t see him again during the regular season until 1994, but I vaguely remembered who he was.

  At the end of the season, I got selected again to go to the Florida Instructional League. Even though I’d caught nearly 50 professional games by that point, I look at that six-week period in 1992 as the start of my catching career. I was told that I would be catching full-time from that point on. Having my options being limited was difficult in some ways, but it freed me in others. If I was going to have to catch, then I could devote all of my time and effort to it.

  One downside remained—I didn’t actually enjoy catching. I wasn’t afraid of the hard work and the wear and tear on my body, but I also wasn’t a masochist who loved the idea of getting beat up by pitches and foul tips.

  When I reported to the instructional league that year, it was like I was being demoted to a lower grade because I went back to Catching 101 and working on the fundamentals of the fundamentals. We worked for hours and hours on everything from the catching stance to footwork, to transitioning from catching the ball to throwing, to receiving the ball, to catching pop-ups, to a dozen other fine points of the position. At that point we weren’t talking about strategy and calling games yet. This was all just the physical grunt work. And believe me, I was doing a lot of grunting. We’d generally start the day with blocking balls in the dirt. At first, I had to do it with my hands behind my back to force me to not get lazy and try to catch them but to move my body—chin tucked into my chest, forehead pointing down, bending at the belly. First a coach pointi
ng in the direction I was to move. Then ball after ball in the dirt. Left. Right. Then with the glove. Coaches nearby yelling, “Block it!” Then balls from the pitching machines, same routine, faster speeds, breaking balls with spin you had to account for.

  I felt like a target in a shooting gallery. Again, I didn’t mind the pain of being hit by a ball—well, I did, but what troubled me was that at times it seemed like I wasn’t getting any better at getting hit by the ball. I thought I had decent reflexes from playing the infield for all those years, but this was different. I tried not to get too discouraged, something that my dad tried to help me with as well.

  Since I’d first left home for Calhoun, he’d told me that my future lay in transforming myself into a catcher. He’d heard from some other scouts that my size and arm made me a good candidate to catch, and he agreed with them. I hadn’t really wanted to hear that back then. I loved being a middle infielder. A lot of his assessment and that of the Yankees was based on my size and my arm. I could always throw, and that’s an important part of being a catcher. What I had to work on was the technique of throwing from behind the plate.

  Ideally, when you throw a ball from any position other than the mound, you want to throw a four-seam ball. In other words, you want to hold the ball so that the two horseshoe ends are parallel to the ground. That way, the seams cut through the air better and the ball travels straighter. In theory that’s the way to do it, but when you’re under pressure and don’t have a lot of time, any seam—or in the worst-case scenario, any grip—will do. Making the transition from having the ball in your glove to having it in your throwing hand is one of the fine points of the game that you really work on more and more as you advance through the ranks. An infielder can sometimes make up for a slow transition with a strong arm, but a catcher trying to throw out a runner who’s stealing a base is less likely to be able to compensate that way.

  The average time for a runner going from first to second on an attempted steal is 3.55 seconds. Some of the top catchers in the game, guys like Pudge Rodríguez, could get the ball out of their glove and down to second in 1.8 to 1.9 seconds, and sometimes even faster than that by a tenth of a second or so. Anything under two seconds is considered good to average. So there’s not a lot of difference between great and okay. Pitchers dictate a lot of the success in defending the running game. Quick slide-steppers—guys who don’t lift their lead legs very high off the ground—can get the ball to home in 1.1 to 1.2 seconds. Slower guys get it there in as long as 1.5 to 1.6 seconds. Add up the high end of both—a slow move to the plate and a slow throw to the bag—and you’ve got about 3.5 to 3.6 seconds. Basically, a pitcher who doesn’t get the ball to home in under 1.5 seconds is making it nearly impossible for any catcher to throw out an average base stealer. All those numbers aside, the margin for error for a runner or a catcher is very, very thin.

  For that reason, we spent hours and hours and hours trying to cut down my throw to the bag by tenths of a second. There are only a few actions you do in baseball during which someone can stand there with a stopwatch and give you instant feedback on something that seems so relatively simple. After all, everyone who has ever played catch has caught the ball and then transferred it to their throwing hand. All those hours spent playing table tennis helped me have quick hands to catch a ball that was off target, but there’s really nothing you can do to simulate what it takes to get a ball out of the glove and into your hand. Add in the footwork it takes to come out of the crouch and throw and you’ve got a complicated set of tasks that you eventually have to stop thinking about and just do. We broke each of the steps down into substeps and worked on them in isolation before putting them all together. Then we added in another set of complications—pitchers and hitters, sometimes with the hitters just standing there and sometimes with them swinging.

  Even catching a baseball is different when you play behind the plate. You have to help your pitcher get the call, and if you stab it and carry your glove out of the strike zone, the umpire isn’t going to give you a strike call. As a result, you have to receive the ball. Here’s the difference: If the pitch is high, catch the top half of the ball. If the pitch is low, catch the bottom half of the ball. If it’s too far left, catch the left half of the ball. Too far right, catch the right half of the ball. Pitchers hate catchers who take pitches away from them. So on top of everything else being somewhat new to me, I even had to think about the simplest thing I’d been doing since I was a little kid—catching the ball.

  And as embarrassing as it is to admit, I wasn’t very good at doing that. When I was assigned to play high A ball at Prince William in 1993, I led the league in passed balls with 38! Thirty-eight. I gave new meaning to the idea of a catcher being called a backstop. I spent almost as much time turning around to face that barrier as I did going out to the mound to talk to pitchers.

  Actually, the guys were pretty patient with me, as was the organization. The first year I did instructional league gave them some idea of what to expect. They had drafted a lefty out of high school named Brien Taylor with their first pick. He was a big, big deal. He threw in the mid- to upper 90s, and they sent him to instructional league. I was told to catch him while he was doing some side work with a bunch of the organization’s player development people and some coaches watching him. First few pitches were fastballs with some good tail on them. I managed to snag them. Then Taylor said, “Two-seamer.” He fired one in, and it moved so much I couldn’t catch it. He did it again, and I missed that one too. One of the AAA pitching coaches came down by me and said, “That’s no two-seamer, that’s a cutter.” Didn’t matter what you called it—I had a hard time catching it.

  Just to put things in perspective, I had 142 passed balls in my 17-year major league career, with the highest number in a single season being 18—which was 20 fewer than that year in Prince William. That was sad and ugly, but I didn’t let it affect me at the plate, where I finished second on the team in homers and RBI. I’m proudest of the 17 stolen bases I had in 22 attempts. All that talk about how to deal with runners on base as a catcher helped me out.

  I recently heard about the author Malcolm Gladwell writing that successful people have to spend 10,000 hours at something in order to achieve at a high level. I never counted the hours, but I’d say that’s a pretty fair estimate of what I put in. I’m not sure I could have made it through all that if my dad hadn’t taught me early on that persistence is an essential skill. He wouldn’t let me give up, and the chores he assigned me, initially at least, seemed like they’d take forever to finish—if I even was able to do that. He showed me time and time again that the job would get done as long as I stuck with it, put in the time every day, did things the right way, and didn’t take shortcuts. As a result, I didn’t question the practice or the diligence that any job required; instead, I just trusted that doing the work was the only way to get it done.

  At the end of the year I got promoted to the AA Albany team for the final games of the season and the playoffs. I got into seven games, allowed two passed balls, but more than held my own at the plate, hitting .280 in that brief appearance there. I switched to a smaller glove, the Wilson 1791, which was about three-quarters of an inch shorter than the Wilson 1790 I’d been using. A smaller glove forced me to center it better, and fewer balls went off its tip and helped me receive the ball with more finesse.

  My glove might have been getting smaller, but my goal was getting larger in my vision. I was learning something else at that point. Despite my struggles, and even though I’d told management that I really wasn’t sure that catching was what I wanted to do, all the work they put me through and the mental discipline I was developing were helping to make it clear that I was on the right track. And all those sprints I’d done were helping me get to those passed balls pretty quickly.

  The following spring training I was told that I was going north to play for the Yankees’ AAA affiliate in Columbus, Ohio. Seven games in AA had been enough—I was one step away from the big leagu
es.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  On the Brink

  The more I thought about the Yankees’ big league team, the more I understood that I had to deal with my failures in order to succeed. Though I’d come so far, I knew this final stretch would be the hardest. To get there, I had to confront my weaknesses—not let them get me down, not forget about them, but acknowledge them.

  Yes, I was one step closer to the big leagues, but I’d only caught one full season in the minor leagues, and only 280 games total over three seasons. I was miles behind other catchers at the Triple A level in any organization. I was also only 22 years old; I may have been a three-year veteran in the Yankees organization, but I was very young and a baby at my position. Still, I had visions that at some point in that first year, maybe at the very end when rosters expanded, I’d get my first shot in the big leagues. I kept that paper I’d written my goals on, and though it included a stop in Double A, I had written it in pencil and could make changes to it.

  In 1994, I joined a team that employed six catchers during the course of the year, including former big leaguer Bob Melvin. The thing that struck me first when I met all the guys on the team was that this was a much older group. I was the only position player who’d made the jump from Prince William to Columbus, but pitchers Andy Pettitte, Matt Dunbar, and Keith Garagozzo spent time in Columbus too. So did two other guys who’d been a part of my past and were going to be an even bigger part of my future—Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera.

  I first met Mariano at the first instructional league I attended. I didn’t know it then, but he was there recovering from Tommy John surgery. Because I was learning to catch, and he wasn’t throwing, we only spent a little bit of time together. What I most remember is watching this guy run in the outfield doing sprints with the position players. He could cover some ground. When I first spoke with him, I asked him why he was throwing left-handed as he lobbed the balls in while shagging flies. He pulled up his sleeve to reveal the scar. I raised my eyebrows and shook my head.