by Wayne Coffey
WEDNESDAY, JULY 27, 2011 CINCINNATI
It is late at night. I am sitting in my hotel room, surrounded by slumbering Dickeys (Anne and the four kids came up from Nashville to visit). I feel as if I am writing an obituary. Nobody died, so I guess I’m being a tad melodramatic, but today my friend and teammate, Carlos Beltrán, was traded to the San Francisco Giants. I’m not happy about it. In fact, I’m pretty angry about it. Mostly, I’m feeling an acute sense of loss.
You’d think, with all my stops in pro baseball, that saying good-bye to a teammate wouldn’t be a big deal. But with where I am in my life—trying to be fully present with all of my feelings—it does feel like a big deal.
I’ve known Carlos for more than a decade, going back to our time as teammates in winter ball in Puerto Rico. We became closer still as Mets teammates the last two years. Anybody who has followed Carlos’s career knows how gifted a player he is, but what I appreciate is his generosity of spirit, his constant willingness to help young players like Jason Pridie and Lucas Duda—to help everybody. It is a side of Carlos that I think is completely unknown to fans.
Ask José Reyes which teammate was always there for him whenever he was going through a rough patch, and José will tell you it was Carlos. Late after one game earlier this year, I was in the sauna with Carlos and Duda and was fascinated to listen to Carlos share with twenty-four-year-old Lucas his thoughts about hitting—not so much the mechanics of it as the psychology of hitting and the thought process he brings with him to the plate. Carlos has never been one to cultivate the media—it’s just not on his list of things he regards as important—so this side of him is not widely known, but this is a good man and a good leader, a man who cares about other people.
When Pridie got called up from the minors, Carlos set him up with his tailor and bought him a couple of suits so he’d have something to wear on road trips. I know he’s done it for other guys too—not because Carlos told me, but because the players with the new threads did. Last night, when it became clear that a deal was close, Carlos took the whole team to a fancy Cincinnati steak house. I wished I could’ve gone, but I stayed back with Anne and the kids. You might find it odd that I didn’t honor Carlos by being there, but if I’ve learned anything in my itinerant ball-playing life, is that any family time you have, you better seize it, because your next good-bye is never far away. I heard later that Carlos spent $8,000 on the baseball version of a last supper.
As for the trade itself, I am trying to be fair and see all aspects of it. I understand the front office has a vision for the future and think they are getting a good deal in receiving young Zack Wheeler, a promising pitcher, from the Giants. I also understand that, as a free-agent-to-be, Carlos was just about ten weeks away from heading out the door anyway. But what sort of message does this send when you deal one of your best players when you are fighting for the playoffs? Doesn’t it say that Sandy Alderson and the front office don’t really believe in us? As I write this, we are two games over .500. Okay, we’re not catching the Phillies, but there isn’t a player in the clubhouse who doesn’t think we can make a run at the wild card. I look around the league and see teams with similar records to us adding players, not subtracting them. So in this moment the competitor in me is perturbed that we seem to be getting written off by our own organization.
Of course, Sandy and his lieutenants—John Ricco, J. P. Ricciardi, and Paul DePodesta—have to think long-term and sometimes tough decisions have to be made. Maybe Zack Wheeler will turn out to be as good as his scouting reports and the trade will ultimately be seen as a steal. I believe in Sandy. Is my reaction to the trade one of emotion more than a dispassionate assessment? No doubt about it. I am a ballplayer, an emotional one, a guy in the midst of a six-month grind. Dispassion isn’t in the mix for me right now. Either way, it doesn’t make writing this baseball obit any easier.
I know that for a lot of Mets fans the enduring image of Carlos will be taking that strike-three, game seven curveball against the Cardinals’ Adam Wainwright to end the 2006 National League Championship Series. I know, too, that there is a perception of him as a passionless player, a guy who has one and only one gear. No, Carlos doesn’t throw stuff and burn hot, but just because he isn’t demonstrative doesn’t mean he doesn’t care. He is one of the best players the New York Mets have ever had. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more even-keeled player—a guy you can count on to be the same person and the same competitor every day, whether he went 0 for 4 or 4 for 4 the day before. That’s huge in baseball, the ultimate get-up-and-do-it-again sport. I’m not making excuses for him; I’m just saying that Carlos is a pro’s pro, a man who makes a hard game look easy. He is somebody I’d want to have on my side any day.
I found out about the trade just before batting practice today. The clubhouse was stirring with the usual activity, guys getting treated and dressed, picking up their bats and balls, heading toward the field. I spotted Carlos at his locker. Hewas packing up his stuff, number 15 of the New York Mets nomore.
“I appreciate you as a player and as a teammate. I am really going to miss you,” I said. Then I hugged him and said good-bye and went out to the field to do my work.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
SOUNDS OF THE MOMENT
Before I ever dip a toe in the river, here is my biggest problem: I can’t get anybody out. In my second start of the season I give up eleven hits and ten runs in five innings. After that, I get raked for seven hits and five runs, including three homers.
Start after start, I pitch glorified batting practice, doing wonderful things to opponents’ batting averages. When I emerge from the dugout in Nashville’s Herschel Greer Stadium, or run wind sprints in front of the big guitar-shaped scoreboard in center field, people do not say, “There goes R. A. Dickey, our stopper.”
A once-promising career has turned into a big Music City mess. I have no clue how close I am to being released, but I can’t be far.
On June 1, my record is 3–4 and my ERA is 6.24, earning me a demotion from the starting rotation. Pitching in my hometown, in the place where I became the state prep player of the year, I feel like I’m letting everybody down, a colossal failure. I reach out to Charlie Hough in the hope that he can help me find an answer. Charlie is as encouraging as ever, and reminds me of all the basics we’ve worked on, but even he can’t sprinkle me with flutterball fairy dust.
How bad is it?
Bad enough that I go online, make out a résumé, and talk to a guy about a job for the first time since I called about the YMCA job five years earlier. Bad enough that I am trying to pretend I know all about the construction supply business. The man’s name is Bruce McClure and his business is called Seven Products Plus, based in Anderson, South Carolina. I don’t know what the seven products are and know even less about Anderson, other than that they call it the Electric City because it was at the forefront of hydroelectric power during the Industrial Revolution. Chris Barnwell is a close friend of the family and Bruce knew about me from my days in the Southeastern Conference at Tennessee and from the 1996 Olympics.
I speak to Bruce about a position in sales. My job would be to get people to buy insulation products.
We have a couple of nice conversations. It seems to be a prosperous business and Bruce is a good guy. I am making $12,500 a month for the five-month minor-league season. We have a new mortgage and a growing family and I need to start formulating a back-up plan in case the Brewers decide they have seen enough.
Let me talk to my wife about it. I’ll stay in touch, I tell Bruce. I think about what it would be like to do this work and not to be a pitcher and an athlete anymore. I think about what it would be like to live in the Electric City after my career goes dark, and to call Charlie Hough with the news that I’ve given up the knuckleball for foam and caulk.
It is a call I can’t imagine making. Not yet, anyway.
Much as I believe in energy conservation, I decide that the first thing I need to save is my career. Bruce actually pushe
s me in the same direction.
We’ll still be here if and when you decide to call it quits, he says.
But the biggest baseball backer of all is Anne. After eleven years of mostly minor-league life, of picking up and moving more than thirty times—of difficulties in our relationship and dealing with my deceit and emotional remoteness and having to carry so much of the family load—Anne says, “You can’t give up on your dream. You don’t want to regret not giving yourself every chance to succeed. You owe it to yourself to give it everything you’ve got.”
How amazing is that?
It is the ultimate in selflessness, the ultimate act of love. I’d like to think I would do the same if the roles were reversed. I am not so sure I would.
Three days after my swim, Sounds manager Frank Kremblas calls on me to pitch in relief against the Memphis Redbirds at home. I pitch a scoreless inning and strike out two. It’s an absurdly small sample, admittedly. But something feels different.
Something feels very different.
A couple of games later, Frank says he wants to start me again. I take the ball against the Omaha Royals at home. It’s ninety-three degrees and as humid as a steambath. I strike out Mitch Maier and Ángel Berroa to start the game. I feel better than I have all year, have a better feel for the knuckleball. In the third, I get the Royals’ first baseman, Billy Butler, on a knuckleball, and as I am coming through Charlie’s doorframe and concentrating on my release, I can’t help being struck at how much in command I feel. It’s only three innings, but I walk back to the dugout feeling strangely empowered.
I give up four hits and one earned run over seven innings. Grant Balfour comes in and gets the save—a more conventional one this time—and I get the victory.
At second base, Chris Barnwell is struck at the baseball rejuvenation going on before his eyes.
The guy almost dies in the river and comes out of it a whole different person, Barnwell says to himself.
I am not a whole different person, but I am surely a changed person. I am not obsessing about how good I have to be to get back to the big leagues, or what numbers I have to put up, or about the time pressure because of my age. I am focusing not on the next month or year or uniform but on the next pitch, putting all my energy into the process of pitching.
Trite but true: my life is about the daily journey, not the final destination.
I don’t mean to make this sound like magic: jump in a big river, cure all your problems. But the difference I see in myself is pretty profound.
In the clubhouse after the game, I say a prayer of thanks and own the fact that I have been a derelict Christian in so many ways. As a Christian, you are supposed to seek God’s will, not follow your own. You are supposed to be a believer all the time, not just when it’s convenient. I fall short in so many ways. I have a hard time surrendering control. I want to be in charge, want to be the director of the show. I have a hard time trusting anybody, even God, to be the guiding force of my life.
I have come to see how hypocritical this is. How can I call myself a true follower of Christ if I subconsciously believe that I should be the one calling the shots?
Since Grant hauled me out of the Missouri, I am beginning to understand that I’ve been bearing a burden almost all of my life, alone and afraid.
Now I am starting to let God carry more of the burden, to trust in His plan for me. If that includes a call-up to the big leagues, great. If it doesn’t, everything will be okay. I used to say that.
Now I’m beginning to truly take it in.
Now, for the first time in my life, I am fully immersed in each moment. Maybe it’s because my moments were very nearly taken away from me; I don’t know. The reasons for the shift are not important. What is important is that I feel so grateful and so present.
What is important is that I am not living on the edge of a self-created abyss anymore, clinging to every stump or branch I can find as the river of life flows by, because I’m terrified of where it’s going.
Without even being conscious of it, I am not trying to take on a river. I am flowing with it.
Or as Lao Tzu, the Chinese philosopher, said, “By letting it go, it all gets done. The world is won by those who let it go. But when you try and try, the world is beyond the winning.”
One of the supreme paradoxes of baseball, and all sports, is that the harder you try to throw a pitch or hit a ball or accomplish something, the smaller your chances are for success. You get the best results not when you apply superhuman effort but when you just are—when you let the game flow organically and allow yourself to be fully present. You’ll often hear scouts say of a great prospect, “The game comes slow to him.” It means the prospect is skilled and poised enough to let the game unfold in its own time, paying no attention to angst or urgency or doubt, funneling all awareness to the athletic task at hand.
This is what is happening to me, post-Missouri. Without conscious thought or concentrated effort, I am completely present with my knuckleball. I am not stewing over it or rushing it. I am just throwing it and reveling in the chance to do so, the grace of God in full glory at sixty feet six inches.
And, better still, I am throwing it my way, with my own imprint. As much as I am grateful to the Rangers for giving me a chance to become a knuckleballer, I never really warmed to the idea of becoming a clone of Charlie or Tim Wakefield, which is what they continually emphasized.
We want you to be like Wake, the club kept telling me.
I want to be like me, I kept thinking.
Be like Wake, they insisted.
What’s wrong with being like me? I insisted.
I am a different pitcher than Tim Wakefield, with different strengths. Why not play to those strengths? The idea of throwing virtually every knuckler in the 60-mile-an-hour range just because that’s what Tim does never made any sense to me. I like to throw 80-mile-an-hour knucklers. I like to throw them at all different speeds, and I like to mix in an occasional fastball and cutter, because I know they can be effective weapons in disrupting a hitter’s timing.
As 2007 goes on, more and more God helps me see and believe that it is time for me to stake out my own knuckleballing turf.
What’s the worst that can happen? I think. That I stay in the minors?
If I’m serious about getting back to the big leagues, the only way it’s going to work is if I pitch my way. I become more committed than ever to throwing my own knuckleball—and throwing it more than I ever have, not just 60 percent of the time. Once I had resistance about turning my pitching life over to the knuckleball, but that has been obliterated by my uneven results.
I’m going to throw 80 or 85 percent knuckleballs now. I’m going to throw a lot of them fast, and let’s see what “they” can do with them.
After the strong start against Omaha, Frank Kremblas puts me back in the rotation for good, it turns out. Five days after shutting down the Royals, I do the same to the Iowa Cubs, pitching into the seventh inning and giving up three hits, striking out eight. I win ten out of my next eleven decisions, the best run of my entire professional career. Chris Barnwell and Grant Balfour and Laynce Nix—they were all there when I almost drowned, and they are all there when I stop taking on water on the mound.
How can you explain what’s going on, this change in you? Laynce, a fellow believer, asks me.
I’m just pitching knuckleball by knuckleball and surrendering to the results. I’m not sure if I shrug when I say this, but Laynce does.
In the last week of July, I am at my locker in the clubhouse when Frank comes over.
Gord Ash is on the phone and wants to talk to you, Frank tells me.
I don’t think I’ve spoken to Gord since he invited me to spring training. I pick up the phone in Frank’s office. The Brewers are in first place and have a big four-game weekend series in St. Louis. Gord asks me if I’d be willing to meet the team in St. Louis and be on standby in case the club needs me to start one of the games.
Sure, I’ll be happy to
meet you in St. Louis, I tell him.
I’ll crawl to St. Louis to meet you, I think.
I get to town on a Friday and meet Gord in the hotel. He fills me in on the situation. Because they aren’t yet sure if they’ll need me, they’re not ready to officially call me up and send somebody else down. Gord doesn’t want any of the pitchers getting worked up if they see me in the lobby or at the coffee bar, so he instructs me to stay in my room. I’m in Westin house confinement, complete with meal money slipped under the door. I’m not allowed to leave lockup until the club leaves for the ballpark. Then I can have the run of the place.
In a strange way, I feel as if I am the Brewers’ secret weapon, ready to be rolled into Busch Stadium when the Cardinals least expect it. Mostly, though, all I am tunneled in on is my hope. Hope, after all, is what keeps me going.
My biggest hope, of course, is that I will get back to the big leagues.
The Brewers win big on Friday night. I never get the call.
Maybe Saturday will be different, I tell myself. There’s a doubleheader, so obviously we’re going to need two starters. I wake up early, praying to hear from Gord Ash.
No call. The Cardinals sweep. Toward the end of the second game, I go out for a walk, so close to Busch Stadium that I hear the roar of the crowd and see the lights, a billion bulbs bathing the night sky in warm, welcoming whiteness. I haven’t been this close to a big-league park since the six-home-run game about sixteen months before.
I keep looking up at the white lights over the dark city; it’s almost as if they are summoning me, like the Missouri. The lights look breathtakingly beautiful.
Will I ever make it back? Is this as close as I’m going to get? I keep walking. Albert Pujols or somebody must’ve hit a double or homer, because a gigantic roar goes up. It’s almost more than I can stand.
I have to get back there, I tell myself. I know I have the ability. I just have to make them take notice. Hearing the sounds of the game I love, standing alone in the darkness, close enough almost to touch the action but still so far away, feels like an out-of-body experience.
