by Wayne Coffey
I know some people in the organization who are getting mighty nervous—and maybe even panicking—thinking I am reverting back to the pitcher I was before I came to the Mets. But I honestly don’t feel too far away from where I was last year. I truly feel like I just need to stay the course and continue to work as hard as I normally do and this poor beginning will turn. The problem is that, like most folks, I am not judged in my occupation based on my feelings but rather my output, and my performance thus far—let’s be honest—has been shoddy. The dichotomy between what you believe you can do and what you actually are doing can wreak all sorts of havoc on your confidence. Being able to walk that tightrope well is something that separates good from great. To lament a bad outing is healthy, but to let it take you to a place of despair is competitive death. I am thankful that my frustration is motivating me to work harder, and trust that the hard work will pay off and that my knuckleball can—and will—get big-league hitters out consistently.
I have to believe that. If I don’t, why am I even here?
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
KNUCKLEBALLER NON GRATA
I am pedaling a ten-speed bicycle through the darkness, getting out of Dodge before any more baseballs fly over the fence. Baseball has records for everything. There’s probably a record for most doubles by a second baseman on an overcast Tuesday. Now I am two-wheeling on a back road toward a T.G.I. Friday’s, about the last place I want to be, thinking about my newest historical claim to fame:
Shortest-lived euphoria to start a season.
How could it get any shorter, really? One minute I am heady with the news that I am in the Rangers’ rotation, starting what I am thinking will be my thriving second career, as a knuckleballer. The next I am joining my fellow knuckleballer, Tim Wakefield, in long-ball lore, giving up six home runs to the Detroit Tigers.
One minute my wife is in town with my father-in-law to celebrate my new beginning and to look for a nice rental home to live in for the season. The next I am thinking that I may not need a house in Texas after all.
I park the bike outside the restaurant and find Anne and her father, Sam, at a table in the back. The back always suits me fine. I really want no part of dinner or the ersatz T.G.I.F. nostalgia, but I had told Anne I would join them after the game, never imagining that I would be doing so after making one of the worst starts in the last hundred years.
So I honor the commitment. I sit down and order my usual beverage: sweet tea. Anne comes from a long line of problem solvers, successful people who bore into troubles like miners drilling into bedrock. And so it begins again, she and her father launching their fact-finding mission before I’ve even chosen an appetizer: What was wrong with your knuckleball tonight? What can you do to correct it? Should you be throwing more of your conventional pitches?
The questions are well-meaning. They don’t know what to say, so I think they figure they’ll help me analyze things and find a solution. I do not want to analyze anything in that moment—not the game, not my career.
Nothing.
I just want to get through my Jack Daniel’s chicken and bike back to the Hyatt. A few times I shoot Anne a vaguely dirty look, a Do-we-really-need-to-do-this-now? look. I am terrible company. I give them terse, disinterested answers and mope and pick at my chicken. I am still half in shock, and that’s how I behave.
Back in the hotel later that night, Anne and I pray together before we go to bed, holding hands, asking God for comfort, peace, and another opportunity. I have a crappy night of sleep. I just hope that tomorrow is better. Early the next morning, I open the curtains to a perfect Texas morning, the sky deep blue. I say out loud, for Anne and myself, “Let’s remember, God’s mercies are new every morning.”
I barely finish saying “Amen” when I look down and see a white Hummer pull up to the hotel. A strapping young man gets out of the car. When he turns around I get a look at his face.
It is Rick Bauer.
I had met him in spring training. He is a former Orioles draft pick whom the Rangers signed after the 2005 season. He was slated to start the season in Oklahoma City. Now he’s checking into the Hyatt. You don’t have to be a sabermetrician to connect the dots. Bauer, a six-foot-six-inch right-hander, is here to join the big club, which means that somebody will be leaving the big club.
That somebody is going to me, I am pretty sure.
A shiny new Hummer delivering my shiny new replacement. Not exactly the answer to my prayer I was looking for.
When I get to the clubhouse that afternoon, Buck calls me into his office right away. It’s the same office where my knuckleballing career began almost a year earlier. Buck closes the door. General manager Jon Daniels and Goose Connor are in the office too. Buck has always been a big supporter of mine. He played the game, had some good years, but never got out of the minors. I know he doesn’t want to be doing this.
I am positive of it. But business is business.
We need a fresh arm for the bullpen. We had to use a lot of arms last night and we’re short. We’re going to send you out to Oklahoma City, he says.
I look at him and don’t say anything for a minute, for a good reason. I am crushed.
This will be my seventh season as an Oklahoma City RedHawk. It’s a town I’ve grown very fond of, but nonetheless a place that I associate totally with my mediocrity as a pitcher. I already own all the RedHawk pitching records. Is this going to be the top line of my baseball résumé: a RedHawk immortal? Is this how it’s going to end for me: another sad-eyed prospect playing out the string on the prairie in front of a thousand fans and a mascot?
It’s not quite how I envisioned it as a little kid.
Of course, I was brutal the night before. Nobody needs to tell me that. I just never thought I’d get only one start to prove myself.
One start? Are you kidding me? I’ve been with the Rangers my whole career. It’s the only team I ever wanted to play for.
Now I’m thinking I may have worn a Rangers uniform for the last time.
Jon and Buck and Goose are quiet and are almost ghost-like in their pallor. I take a moment to collect myself.
Don’t lose it, hang on, I tell myself. Keep it together.
When I think I’ve collected myself, I stand up and look squarely at each of them in succession. My voice starts to crack.
I understand why you are doing this, but I just want to tell you one thing: that outing last night will not define me as a big-league pitcher. It won’t. I can promise you that.
I shake their hands and go to my locker and throw my stuff in a bag. I scan the room and wonder if I’ll ever be in a big-league clubhouse again.
When I walk out this door, will that be it?
I pack up the hotel room. I wonder how Rick Bauer is going to do. Anne flies home with her dad so I can drive the car to Oklahoma City. She wants to come to Oklahoma with me, but I want to be alone. I want to brood. I head north on Interstate 35, out of Texas and the big leagues, a stretch of road I know all too well. It is hot and quiet and the red earth just goes on and on. I cross into Oklahoma and pass through towns named Lone Grove and Springer and Joy. I pass a sign for Crazy Horse Municipal Airport and a place called Slaughterville.
Slaughterville. How perfect. It’s where I spent the night before, getting butchered by the Detroit Tigers.
It’s a place I never want to go back to again.
TWO DAYS after I arrive back in Oklahoma City, Jon Daniels calls me. I am in the office of RedHawks manager Mike Boulanger, alone. Jon tells me that the club is taking me off the forty-man roster again, or designating me for assignment, as they say in baseballspeak. (I had been put back on the forty-man when I made the big club.) So I am a used resin bag again, completely expendable.
The Rangers figure there is no risk of losing me, because—let’s face it—what’s the market for a thirty-one-year-old knuckleballer who has just given up six home runs?
The Rangers are right. Not a single club in the major leagues claims me. So I stay a RedH
awk, go right into the rotation, and perform miserably. In one twenty-three-inning stretch, I give up eight home runs. Through my first eight starts, my record is 2–5 and my ERA is over 7.00. My shoulder’s barking and we decide to give it a rest and I spend a few weeks on the disabled list. I am marginally better when I come back. I try to keep in mind that I am still a knuckleballing novice, but how can I not wonder where this is going—where my life is going?
This switch to knuckleballing was supposed to make things better, not worse. I have so many questions, so many worries. Baseball is the least of them.
Anne is pregnant with our third child that summer. It should be a joyful time, with our two healthy girls and a baby boy on the way, but it’s not. I am worried sick about money, for one thing. We’ve just bought a house in Nashville. Anne and the kids stay there so we can save on the cost of a rental house in Oklahoma City. I go back to my nomadic days, staying with a pastor friend, at a Red Roof Inn, or at an Econo Lodge for $70 a night. When we go on the road, I check out of the hotel and haul my stuff to the clubhouse, then haul it back to the hotel when we return. I spend hours poring over our bank accounts and credit card bills and mortgage payments, trying to make the numbers work. We may not be going under, but I have a hard time seeing beyond my financial fears. I didn’t grow up with money, and when you are not used to having it, you want to hold on to every penny. I will troll around the Internet for hours trying to save fifty bucks on an air conditioner. If you give me the choice between a label and a bargain, I’m going for the bargain. Anne grew up in a notable Nashville family, with money.
Guess what one of our biggest marital issues is?
Hint: it’s not my pitch selection.
One day that summer Anne goes to a flea market, looking for something to put on the front porch of our new house. She finds these beautiful decorative urns. In a typical store they would probably be $300 each. In the flea market they are $100 for the pair. She knows how concerned about money I am and does a great job finding a bargain for something that she wants for our home. She calls me to talk about it. I immediately step into the hallway of a hotel somewhere in Middle America; you never want to have an argument with your wife in front of your roommate.
What do we need decorative urns for? What’s the point of it, other than to clutter up the porch? I say.
I really like them, R.A. They will look so nice. They fit perfectly and they really don’t cost much when you compare it to getting them from a store.
I don’t give a crap what they cost in a store. A hundred bucks is a hundred bucks. Our resources are not infinite. We can live without decorative urns for now, don’t you think?
I keep badgering her. I am being totally controlling. A complete jerk. It’s not as if Anne is being reckless. On the contrary, she is being careful. She wants our home to look nice. I keep trying to beat her down, with my harshness and criticism.
Go ahead and get your urns, I say. But don’t complain to me when the next check you write bounces. Anne gets the urns. They’re lovely, I hear. They get stolen off the porch a month later.
It’s one more thing to argue about, one more marital sparring session.
Between mounting financial pressure on one side and mounting baseball pressure on the other, I feel like Luke Skywalker, Chewbacca, Han Solo, and Princess Leia from Star Wars: Episode IV when they fall into a trash compactor and the walls start closing in on them. It feels as if the trash is getting squeezed right up in my face. That seems about right.
Because I feel like trash. I feel like trash for lots of reasons, one much bigger than the rest.
I have strayed.
I have broken a vow I made to Anne and to God. I have become what I promised to myself I would never become: a caricature of a lustful ballplayer. I am not a serial offender, and do not sleep all over town, but the scope of it doesn’t matter. What matters is the breach of trust.
I look in the mirror and I hate what I see, what I have evolved into. I feel distant from Anne, distant from myself. Even more, I feel like a fraud, in that the R.A. the world knows is so different from the R.A. who I know. I feel scared and burdened, and those feelings are overpowering my wobbly faith. So I resort to my time-worn strategy: I run. I escape. I get lost in books and go to movies, sitting in the back and eating popcorn. I play baseball for a living, which is an escape in itself. It is a life that can make you a perennial adolescent, where your needs and whims are catered to, and narcissism is as prevalent as sunflower seeds, a life that is about as un-family-friendly as you can imagine. People see the glamour and the big money of being a ballplayer, but they may not see the dysfunction and profound stresses it puts on wives and children. You are away for six weeks in spring training, and then you flit in and out of your family’s life for the next six months. You say “good-bye” more than any other word in the English language, and even if you try to be a dedicated family man, you invariably miss things. Hugely important things.
You know where I was when our daughter, Lila, was born? In a Chick-fil-A in the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, trying to get a connection flight home.
You know where I was when our son, Elijah, was born? In the visitor’s clubhouse in Round Rock, Texas, right before a start, my mother-in-law holding up the phone as Anne Dickey was giving birth. (There was no such thing as paternity leave in the minor leagues in 2006.)
When you are away so much, almost every conversation back home seems to be conducted in a pressure cooker, where you talk about new tires for the car, kids’ ear infections, and the swelling cell phone bill, all in rapid order.
If you have any self-awareness at all, you realize how uneven the distribution of responsibilities is. Your wife is going to the pediatrician and calling the plumber and meeting with the teacher, and you are working on your knuckleball grip in a bullpen session.
Your wife is reading bedtime stories and checking for monsters in the closet and then getting up first thing for school, while you are hanging with the guys after a game and sleeping until eleven in the morning. Don’t get me wrong: I work hard at what I do. I want to make the most out of every appearance on a big-league mound. And I love my work, and feel blessed to be doing it. But at the top level, let’s face it, it’s an otherworldly existence in which there’s all this adulation and fanfare and you travel by charter jet and stay in $350-per-night hotels, and it’s as if the whole world is telling you, not very subtly: You are very, very special.
I know in my heart I am no more special than any other of God’s children. I know that the kid in the clubhouse and the attendant in the parking lot are just as important in the universe as I am, and maybe more so. Maybe they are doing more to make a difference and to help people. Maybe they are more faithful to their beliefs. I’m just a flawed human being with an unreliable knuckleball, and in the summer of 2006 those flaws feel as if they are overwhelming everything else in my life.
I feel inadequate in every way possible: in my walk with God and especially in my role as husband and life partner to the former Anne Bartholomew. I am not giving her what she needs—and what she deserves. I have a picture of what a good husband should be. He is loving and kind and patient and loyal and makes his wife feel as if she is the only woman in the world. He knows how to tend to her heart.
I have no idea how to tend to her heart. That is not close to who I am. I am aloof and not often physically affectionate. I don’t routinely grab her hand or tell her how much I love her or surprise her with flowers.
I retreat from intimacy. Intimacy terrifies me. I know, more unconsciously than consciously, that it has everything to do with my past and the horror of my sexual abuse. My experiences have obviously shaped me, but I don’t live in the past anymore. I live in the present. When am I going to have the courage to face the demons I’ve been hiding and fleeing from my whole life? I can’t help but feel that if Anne had to do it again, she would want no part of marrying me. I feel alone. So does she.
Sometimes I wonder if you even lo
ve me. Do you love me? she asks.
Of course I love you.
Then why don’t you show it? Why are you always getting angry at me and tearing me down? Why are you tender and loving with the kids and not with me?
Well, it’s different with the kids. They need that affection. They need to feel loved and secure.
Don’t you understand that I need it too? Why am I the last one on line?
You aren’t last. I don’t know. It’s just easier with the kids.
Why is it easier? Why can’t you show me that you love me too? Why is that so hard?
Anne is 100 percent right, of course. But I can’t admit it. I am too walled off, too defensive. I find excuses. I blame it on her and her spending habits. I blame it on my bad ERA. I blame it on anything but myself. I go into rages and I am ashamed of that, and even more ashamed that I have lied to Anne and deceived her.
Before we got married I told her I was a virgin, and I was not. I never told her that I was sexually abused and never told her that I was exposed to pornography at a young age, the same summer that the abuse happened. I never told her how physical touch had become something I associated with being violated and bullied and taken advantage of. She had a right to know all of that and I didn’t tell her because I was afraid I would lose her.
Or was the guilt and shame so powerful, there was no way to begin to even speak about it?
