by Wayne Coffey
I hear a voice:
Relax, I’ve got you. Relax, R.A. It’s okay. It’s going to be okay. I’ve got you.
The voice is the Holy Spirit. The restraint is the Holy Spirit. I was just talking to God in prayer on the balcony and now He is talking back, bestowing on me a composure that could not have come from anywhere else.
I’ve got you.
The tsunami passes. I am crushed by Doug Melvin’s words but I am not going to do anything stupid. I am not going to lose control.
I’ve got you.
I get up slowly. I don’t say a word. I walk out with Mark and pass the balcony and don’t stop to look at the field or Roger Pavlik or his red shoes. I’m in a complete daze, almost as though I don’t know who I am or where I am or what just happened, as if my whole life’s hard drive has been wiped out.
Mark drives me to the airport. He tries to boost my spirits but it’s not going anywhere and we both know it. We pass through security and pass all these people and they’re all going places and living their lives and none of them knows or cares what just happened to me, a little laxity leaving me as shattered as Skip Bertman’s crystal baseball. I go to the gate, get on my plane, the rage dissipating, replaced by a terrible loneliness. A loneliness that feels terminal. I left Nashville that morning, full of excitement. I come back that afternoon, full of this total, solitary despair.
We are going to retract our offer.
Melvin’s words keep running through my head. I look out the window at thirty thousand feet. I search for comfort, any comfort at all, and find it, not in Doug Melvin’s seven words, but in the Holy Spirit’s three: I’ve got you.
The plane lands. I am home. I am going to be all right.
SATURDAY, MARCH 12, 2011 EN ROUTE TO ORLANDO
We’re on the bus to Walt Disney World, where we’ll see Mickey, Donald, and Chipper. Well, Chipper (Jones), at least. We’re playing the Braves in my third start of the spring, and I find myself thinking about how much I love spring training. I love it because it comes bundled with hope. Indeed, it is all about hope. This isn’t the most original thought I’ve ever had, I know, but still, optimism abounds when your record is 0–0 and you are starting anew. You see the upside, not the downside. You see possibility, not impossibility. Nobody has yet written what a joke your club is. Sports talk radio has yet to heat up. Nobody has booed or belittled you. In the spring, hope is as palpable as the palm trees, even for clubs coming off a bad year the way we are. Hope is a nice thing to have, however long it lasts.
For me, this spring has another quality for me to savor. For the first time in my life, I have a guaranteed job. I have a two-year deal and I know where I’m going to be pitching. All that does is change everything. I can focus on getting into shape and working on my craft, and not worry about impressing somebody so I can stick around for another week.
Last year, my first with the Mets, I was the first guy cut. The first. I said hello and good-bye in the same sentence.
Against the Braves, I wind up having an ugly line, giving up five runs and four walks in five innings, but I am not concerned at all. The Braves hit only one ball hard. I had a good feel for my knuckleball, and when it missed the zone, it wasn’t by much. I thought a bunch of the pitches that were called balls were actually strikes. The plate umpire—a minor leaguer—told me afterward, a bit sheepishly, that he’d never called a game pitched by a knuckleballer before. Honestly, it showed, because he missed a lot of pitches, but I appreciated his candor. Even in spring training, it’s the kind of admission you rarely hear from an umpire, and it shows me a whole lot. No names here, because it will seem like I’m trying to work Mr. X for future advantage and I’m not.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE LONE RANGER
I almost forget about the other words Doug Melvin said, about getting additional testing on my elbow done. The Rangers want me to go see Dr. James Andrews in Birmingham, Alabama.
Fine with me. Maybe there’s still hope.
The next day, my father (who hasn’t been a big part of this whole draft process) decides to come with Anne and me to Birmingham. We ride in my father’s maroon Chevy Cavalier, a straight two-hundred-mile shot down Interstate 65. I am sitting in the front passenger seat, still exhausted from the day before. When I am awake, I am praying pretty much nonstop. After we pull into Dr. Andrews’s parking lot, my dad turns off the car and the three of us say another prayer.
Please give me the strength to deal with whatever happens today. Please see me through this, God. Please be there for me and make this nightmare go away.
Andrews’s office is like a mall on Christmas Eve: crazy busy, people coming and going everywhere. The walls are covered with photos of big-name pitchers he has operated on, from Roger Clemens to John Smoltz. When it’s my turn he starts examining me, doing many of the same tests as Conway.
I don’t see any real problems with your elbow, Andrews says. The attrition in it is a little worse than most guys your age, but that’s understandable because you’ve thrown a lot more than most guys. Let’s go ahead and take an MRI while you’re here and make sure we’re all good and then we’ll be done with you.
I like this doctor. I like him a lot. From what Andrews is telling me, he’ll report to Conway that everything checks out and my offer should be back on the table.
I go downstairs and put on a hospital gown. They inject my arm with a dye and I get inside the MRI tube, and the jackhammering sounds begin, harsh and loud and metallic. I have headphones on but they barely help. Finally after forty-five minutes the jackhammering stops. I get changed and go back upstairs. That takes some time. I get off the elevator and turn a corner. The first person I see is Anne.
She is walking toward me. She has tears in her eyes. She hugs me.
I hope the Rangers believe in miracles, she says.
Beyond her, in an alcove at the end of the hallway, I see a cluster of doctors in white jackets in front of an MRI screen, looking at my elbow. There seems to be animated discussion and debate, and lots of pointing at the screen. I walk up to see what’s going on.
Andrews gets to me first. We step into his office.
I can’t find the existence of an ulnar collateral ligament in your elbow, Andrew says. I’ve looked at thousands of these. I’ve seen torn UCLs and frayed UCLs. I’ve done a million Tommy John surgeries to repair UCLs. I’ve never in my life seen an elbow with no UCL at all where the patient is completely asymptomatic.
So much for hope. So much for all my prayers. I’m a clinical marvel to Dr. James Andrews, an orthopedic oddity for the ages, a physiological freak. Check it out, check it out . . . See the pitcher with no UCL. I can join the circus, but I can’t get my offer back from the Texas Rangers.
Andrews theorizes that I could’ve been born without the UCL in my right elbow, though he thinks it’s more likely that I injured it when I was young and it just withered up and died at some point. He can’t believe that I am not in extreme discomfort. Nor can he believe that I can throw the ball pretty much where I want. The UCL—a thick, triangular band of tissue—is the main stabilizing ligament in the elbow. Without it, the infrastructure of the elbow should be about as stable as a car without a steering wheel.
It should hurt you to turn a doorknob, to shake hands, to do the most routine of tasks, he says.
Dr. Andrews’s disbelief about what he sees only makes me feel worse. He is so confounded, in fact, that he wants to do another MRI.
I go back downstairs, get back in the gown, back in the tube. I am beside myself. When the jackhammering starts again, I feel as though I might have a full-blown anxiety attack. I distract myself by trying to think of arguments to make to Doug Melvin.
Because I don’t have a UCL, that means it can never get torn or hurt. Think of the reassurance that comes with that. Maybe I should be worth even more money!
I’m not so naïve to think the argument will fly. I get through MRI number two and go back upstairs. The new picture shows nothing different
. I am still a pitcher without the one indispensable stabilizing ligament that you need to throw a baseball.
After I leave, Andrews calls Conway and tells him the shocking news and of course recommends that the Rangers not sign me.
I am, after all, not whole. Not what I seemed to be. I am damaged goods.
The dream crushing is now complete. It is so unfair; that’s the feeling I have above all others. It’s just so unfair for this to happen, and in this way. Can you imagine a worse scenario, getting drafted on the first round and offered all this money and then have it yanked away because of a one-in-a-billion medical condition?
I pray to God for understanding, for a way to get through this, but the truth is I have very little understanding. I am angry at God, angry at the Rangers, angry at the world. The whole thing taps into all my old wounds about being different from every other kid, being damaged in a deep way even if the world can’t see it. This just confirms it. I am different. I am damaged.
I am the Pitcher Without an Ulnar Collateral Ligament.
Newspaper sports sections report all about this oddity. The tabloid TV shows call to do a segment on me. So does Strange Universe. The bizarre tale sweeps through baseball. Did you hear about that kid the Rangers took on the first round? Can you believe there’s a pitcher who doesn’t have a UCL?
We drive back to Nashville and I hole up in the Bartholomews’ house. I don’t want to see or hear from anybody. I don’t know where I go from here. No team is going to touch me after Dr. Andrews’s MRI. I guess my best option is to go back to Tennessee for my senior year. I can finish up my degree. Maybe if I have another strong season, a club will decide to take a chance on me, UCL or no UCL.
The phone rings in the house one afternoon. My future mother-in-law, Vicki, answers it, and a few moments later, from the next room, I hear her voice and anger rising. She sounds as though she’s going to start cussing.
Vicki Bartholomew never cusses.
How could you do this to this young man? Do you know how cruel this is, to take his dream and rip it up in his face? Do you have any heart at all?
I walk over to Vicki to try to get her to calm down. I don’t know who she’s talking to. I appreciate her speaking up for me. I wonder who’s getting the earful. She hands me the phone.
It’s someone from the Rangers. I think his name is Nolan.
No, it couldn’t be. Could it? Don’t tell me that Vicki just dressed down a Hall of Famer and my hero. Please don’t tell me that.
I take the phone.
Hi, this is R. A. Dickey.
Hey, R.A. It’s Nolan Ryan. I can see y’all have some people there who are upset about things, and I don’t blame them. I was just calling to tell you I’m sorry the way things happened. I sure hope you stay with it and things work out for the best for you.
Nolan is good friends with Lenny Strelitz, the Rangers’ scouting director. I’d gotten to know Lenny pretty well. I’m sure he is the person who asked Nolan to call.
Nolan goes on to tell me that he pitched the last five or six years with a messed-up ulnar collateral ligament. He talks about all the people who doubted him when he was a young pitcher who couldn’t throw strikes.
We talk for five minutes and I tell him how much I appreciate him calling, and apologize that he got an earful when he was just trying to do something nice.
Don’t worry about it, he says.
A week passes and the semester is beginning at Tennessee. I re-enroll and pick my classes. My senior year begins the next day with a 9:00 a.m. class in nineteenth-century American literature. Melville and Hawthorne await me. Once I step foot in that classroom on the UT campus, then I am committed to school and can’t sign with a pro team until the following June. I get my books together and start trying to wrap my head around Moby-Dick when my agent calls, telling me he has just spoken with Doug Melvin, my personal Captain Ahab.
Doug has been rethinking my situation. He called his own father and asked for advice. His father tells him: You can’t just cut this kid loose and not give him anything. You owe him something—even if it’s nowhere near the eight hundred you were going to give him.
Melvin thinks, My dad’s right. I broke this kid’s heart. I have to do something.
My agent tells me: The Rangers want to sign you if you’ll take $75,000.
It includes an invitation to big-league training camp. It is a take-it-or-leave-it proposition.
Mark and I don’t have to talk long. The UCL, as of this moment, has officially cost me $735,000. Their offer is more like fifteenth-round money than first-round money, but in the Rangers’ mind that’s about where I am.
I accept the offer, sign the contract, and withdraw from Tennessee, then hold a press conference at Montgomery Bell Academy so I can go through the whole mess and not have to answer questions for weeks on end. I roll out every platitude I can think of about adversity and about how champions are people who rise above it. I say that I am not sad and not discouraged about my big offer being pulled, both naked lies.
I am sad and I am discouraged. I just don’t want to say so publicly.
I use the money to buy Anne’s engagement ring, pay off my Lloyd’s of London premium, pay the taxes on the bonus, and take care of some of my father’s debts. I don’t know how he ran them up, but he is in some financial trouble and I have to help him out with it.
I have $7,000 left.
In early October, I borrow a white Dodge Ram and drive fourteen hours to Port Charlotte on the Gulf coast of Florida, where the Rangers have their instructional league team. I pull into the complex and walk into the clubhouse and see a man standing there. I have no idea who he is. Turns out he is Reid Nichols, the former big-league outfielder who is a Rangers minor-league executive.
I don’t introduce myself, don’t ask him his name, either. I’m being rude, but I don’t really care.
Can you tell me where the weight room is? I ask.
Nichols points to his right and I go off and lift for a solid hour. This is how I begin my career in pro baseball—beneath a stack of iron plates. I am defiant. I am going to outwork every human being on the planet.
I am going to do whatever it takes to make it.
This is the face I am putting on for the world, but the truth is different. I’m ready to work my tail off, for sure, but I also am more insecure than I have ever been in my life. For as long as I’ve been in sports—as a pitcher in baseball or a forward in basketball or a quarterback in football—I’ve never had anybody tell me I couldn’t do something. I’ve lost games and missed shots and thrown interceptions, of course, but mostly I’ve succeeded and delivered, again and again, and gotten applauded for it. Now, for the first time, somebody—the Texas Rangers organization—is doubting me.
Doubting whether I can overcome my missing ligament and whether I can ever help them as a pitcher.
I stare at the ceiling in the hotel where all the Rangers’ instructional players live and think: What if I can’t do it? I think I can, but what if I can’t? What will my life be like if I can’t play pro baseball?
I go back and reread some of my old press clippings from Tennessee, read about big games I pitched and won and being named an All-American. I am trying to convince myself that I am the same guy, capable of the same success.
I look in the mirror. I am the same guy, R. A. Dickey. Six feet two inches, 215 pounds, from Nashville, Tennessee. Throws right, bats right.
You are the same guy, I keep telling myself. You can do this. You can show the whole world that UCLs are way overrated.
It is a tough sell.
CHAPTER EIGHT
MINOR ACHIEVEMENT
Like any prospect, I want my time in the minors to be as short as possible. Succeed, advance, and say good-bye to bus rides forever. That’s my career game plan, and after all the emotional tumult of 1996, I try to believe in myself and put it into place. But first there is a little detail to take care of first:
I want to ask Anne Bartholomew to marr
y me.
From the time I met Anne ten years earlier, I knew in my heart I wanted to be with her. Now that I’m out of college and pitching pro ball, there’s no reason to wait. I start by visiting an independent diamond dealer in Arkansas. My agent knows him and tells me I can trust him. I don’t trust easily, but as a man who would have a hard time telling the difference between the Hope diamond and dime-store zirconium, what choice do I have? I pick out a rock and the setting, and pray that it’s not a fake. When it’s all finished, the dealer mails it to me in Tennessee.
It is almost Thanksgiving. The Bartholomews have invited my mother and me to have dinner with them at their home in Belle Meade. My mother has five years of recovery behind her now and is becoming a whole new person, and I’m so happy she’s going to be able to share this moment with me.
I start things in motion a few days before, when I ask Sam, Anne’s father and a former West Point linebacker, if I might speak with him in his office, an elegantly paneled room with an antique wooden desk and keepsakes from a lifetime. The wood is so rich in Sam’s office it seems three feet deep. We’re sitting in two plush armchairs in front of his desk. I am very nervous and he knows it.
Sam, I’d like to ask Anne to marry me, and I’d like to ask for your blessings in doing that.
Sam stands up and I follow his lead.
So you’re finally ready to get serious, are you? he says. I was wondering when we were going to have this conversation. He gives me a hug and smiles.
I hope you are not expecting a dowry. I’ve always looked at you as one of my sons and I’m honored that you want to marry my daughter.
Sam’s words mean so much because he’s someone I’ve leaned on and sought counsel from, a man who has been a constant paternal presence in my life. I look around at the handsome desk and panels and three-foot deep wood. I am starting to lose it. I do not want to lose it, part of me being afraid that if I start crying I might never stop.
