by Wayne Coffey
As I sit on the examining table, I am remembering my own advice. The last thing I want is to give the Mets any reason to look someplace else for a starting pitcher, or to put me on the DL. Pain I can deal with. I’m not going to do anything idiotic, but I am good with pain. The doctor pokes and prods.
Does this hurt? he asks. I shake my head. Then he moves down my foot a bit and presses hard. How about this?
No, not much, I say every time he asks. I am lying. I am an accomplished liar when it comes to staying on the field. In a game against the Cardinals a bit later in the season, David Freese hits me in the neck with a line drive. I pick the ball up and throw him out at first to end the inning. In the dugout tunnel, Ray Ramirez, our trainer, checks me out and asks me: Did that get you? I am positive I will be out of the game if he knows I took a line drive in the neck.
No, it got a piece of my glove. I’m fine, I say.
Ray goes and checks the replay, but it’s not definitive; it looks as if I did get my glove up. I skate, and stay in the game.
Dr. Deland keeps probing. I keep telling him it doesn’t hurt. I am thinking about my next start. It is all I am thinking about. Pain? What pain?
For the next few days I get almost round-the-clock treatment from Ray. He gives me ultrasound and heat and ice and a whirlpool. Rohan Baichu, our massage therapist, goes at the underside of my right foot hard. It hurts a ton, but I don’t say a word. My foot feels much better after he’s done. The treatments are working. Three days later, I tell Dan Warthen I want to have my usual bullpen session. He’s surprised but likes the way I am throwing the ball.
I need to see you field your position, he says. He rolls a series of balls out to see how well I can get off the mound. I get off the mound okay. Not great, but okay. He asks how it feels, and I lie again.
I’m good to go, I tell him.
Five days after going splat on the Wrigley grass, I have convinced the Mets I am ready for my next start, against the Pirates at Citi Field. I ask Ray for an injection of Toradol, a painkiller and anti-inflammatory, an hour before first pitch. I’ve never taken anything stronger than Advil before getting on the mound, but my foot is still barking at me and I know I need a little help. I get the shot in the butt, and it makes a big difference.
I don’t make another start the rest of the year without Toradol.
Against the Pirates, I fight through the pain for the first inning but then the Toradol kicks in. I take a two-hit shutout and a 1–0 lead into the eighth, only to see it dissolve on a two-out, two-run single by Neil Walker. I strike out a career-high 10 hitters and throw 81 strikes and only 27 balls.
I take the loss and fall to 2–6. It’s not the outcome I had in mind, but I feel good about the effort and I think the Mets feel good about it too.
The effort, it occurs to me later that night, is really what matters the most, isn’t it? Outcomes can get completely convoluted, buffeted by all manner of forces and factors. You honor yourself and your game when you pour all you have into it, when you live in the athletic moment. I will never have the weaponry of Tim Lincecum or CC Sabathia, but I can give just as much of myself. I can compete as hard, or harder. It’s the lesson Uncle Ricky kept pounding into me as a kid: the mental is to the physical as four is to one.
Without putting it so succinctly, my mother taught me the same thing, and I appreciate her more every day for it.
My mother is one of the toughest and most resilient people I know, and one of the best. More by deed than word, she taught me that you do not pout or mope or pass blame when things don’t go your way. If you have a problem, you find a solution. If you make a mistake, you look in the mirror.
If your car breaks down after picking up your toddler from day care and you get attacked by a dog as you walk to get help, you make sure the baby is safe and you keep walking.
My mom, Leslie, has walked through so much in her life. She grew up with abuse and alcoholism, became a teenage mother, had a marriage end, worked two jobs to get by, suffered from alcoholism and could only guess what a healthy, loving family life looked like, and wouldn’t think she deserved it if she found it. She spent two decades walking on eggshells, especially after five o’clock, when Granddaddy started drinking and friends knew not to come over. My mom would always be the peacemaker, no matter what it took. One night when Granddaddy was raging and screaming at my mom’s brother Bob, the two of them wound up in a scuffle, fists and foul language flying, and my mother jumped on Granddaddy’s back to try to get him to stop, because that was and is her way, always keeping on, always wanting to make things better for everybody else. In time she got around to caring for herself in the same way, pursuing recovery, getting counseling, and starting to change the harsh, self-critical tapes that had been playing in her head her whole life. My mom bounced around emotionally for much of the time I was bouncing around the minors, but she never stopped giving or fighting for the right thing. When I asked her to write about some of her reflections on her life and mine for this book, she wrote two thousand powerful, honest, and profoundly loving words, including these:
“I really thought you didn’t like me or were ashamed of me, so I always watched you from what seemed like a distance as you got older … but I was always so proud of you… .”
When I was thirteen, I walked out on my mother and ripped her heart out. I walked back in after I got my own help and faced my own demons. Now we are as close as a mother and son can be, both of us taking the risk that that necessarily entails. Now she brings love and light into our home every week, helping, giving, loving her grandchildren, loving all of us. Now I cannot imagine my life without her. After I got hurt in Chicago, she saw an interview with me and called to say, “You spoke so eloquently it made me very proud.” The pride goes both ways.
I have not had the same sort of breakthrough with my father. There is so much that remains unspoken, a chasm that I do not pretend to understand, one that has widened as the years have passed. It makes me sad and makes me long for something more. I love my father and want to share the closeness we once had. I have prayed for that for years, and pray that in some way this book will help achieve that.
PRINCE FIELDER is at the plate, coiled in wait, a man mountain with a helmet, a nose guard disguised as a first baseman. He’s one of the best power hitters in the game, a guy I love competing against. It’s the top of the second inning at Citi Field. The knuckleball is usually a great weapon against most big swingers, but Prince is a bit different because he has power to all fields, and can wait on the ball well. He takes a knuckleball for a strike, and I come back with another one that misses. I throw another knuckleball and he fouls it off, and then the same—a knuckleball that he fouls off. He’s ready to battle me; I can see it and feel it—that this is going fifteen rounds. He’s not cutting back on his swing, but moving his hands quickly to fend off whatever I am coming up with. Five times in a row I go at him with good, diving knuckleballs, and he gets a piece of every one.
After each pitch, I think about whether it’s time to mix it up and throw Prince a fastball. As a pitcher, I never want to be predictable, or get into a rut with my pitch patterns. My goal is to always keep the hitter guessing, wondering. Of course he knows I am going to be throwing knuckleballs most of the time. But will it be the slow one or the fast one or the medium one? Or will I try to sneak a fastball by him while he’s sitting in the knuckler?
You don’t want the hitter comfortable, or sure about what’s coming.
The at-bat is now into its eighth pitch. I look in to Josh Thole, my catcher, and we’re staying the course. I come through Charlie’s doorframe and push forward with my hips, getting them fully involved, the way Phil wants me to. I look to throw the pitch with my arm path bisecting my body, the way Tim advises, and throw it one baseball width above Josh’s mask, my usual guidepost, because that gives the ball plenty of room to drop and still be a strike. I throw one of the two or three best knuckleballs of my whole life, a ball that plunges eighteen inches,
down and in.
I am sure I’ve got him.
Fielder fouls it off.
I am stunned. I have no idea how he gets a piece of it. Somehow he is able to drop his hands and flick the bat forward, dribbling a ball toward the dugout. He looks out at me and then at the ump and shakes his head, as if to say, “That was a nasty pitch, man.”
The count is still 1-2. It feels as if he’s been in the box for fifteen minutes. On the ninth pitch of the at-bat, after eight straight knuckleballs, Josh calls for a fastball. Josh’s instincts are that Fielder’s seen so many good knuckleballs in this at-bat and is so locked into them that he won’t expect anything but another one. I agree wholeheartedly. It’s time to defrost him.
I wind and fire, an 87-mile-per-hour fastball, a little up and a little in.
Fielder is not expecting it. It ties him up. He manages to tip it, but not enough. The ball settles into Josh’s glove.
Strike three.
Fielder glares at me and then smiles as he walks back to the Brewers’ dugout. I smile, too, if only on the inside. We both know that it may be the only 87-mile-per-hour fastball that will beat him the entire year. It’s one of my most gratifying moments of the season, going mano-a-mano with one of the best hitters alive, and prevailing.
Four innings later, Fielder is back in the box, and he gets some payback, grounding an RBI single up the middle. It’s a good pitch that he does well to get the bat on. I can do nothing but credit him with a good piece of hitting. The duels with Prince Fielder that day remind me why I love what I do so much. There’s nothing like it. It’s what I will miss the most when I’m not playing anymore.
BASEBALL, FOR ME, is a game of managing regrets. You are always going to have regrets; they are as much a part of baseball as home plate. As a pitcher, I may regret that I was afraid to throw my knuckleball when I was behind in the count. I may regret that I didn’t change speeds, or was too predictable in my pitch sequence, or that I didn’t anticipate that an opposing pitcher would be sitting on a fastball. If you let your regrets linger, they will devour you. Remember Greg Maddux’s words: You need a short memory. You manage your regrets by letting them go, taking them to the curb as if they were the trash.
You manage them by forgetting them as soon as the ball leaves your hand, or leaves the park, and turn 100 percent of your intensity and your competitiveness to the next pitch. It’s the only pitch you can throw, after all.
As the 2011 season winds down, I feel good about my body of work and how I’ve managed my regrets, and there were no shortage of them. I regret my lack of feel for my knuckleball early on, my propensity for giving up home runs in big spots, my putrid start that had me staring at an ERA over 5.00. I could easily have let these things turn my season into a train wreck, but I managed them well. In the twenty-four starts I’ve made since I left Houston, I have won only six times, but I’ve pitched to an ERA of just over 2.60—one of the best ERAs in the league over that span. I have a streak of eleven straight quality starts, dating to July.
Now I have one more, my last start of the season, in the first game of a doubleheader. It’s at Citi Field, against the Phillies. The Phillies have the division locked up and we have the off-season locked up, so theoretically the game means nothing.
It means plenty to me.
After I have the season’s last shot of Toradol in my rear end—I will not miss those things—I sit at my locker in the back right corner of the clubhouse, Chris Capuano at the locker to my left, Jonathon Niese to my right. I am not one to get overly nostalgic, but I am wistful about the season being over. I’m about to turn thirty-seven years old, and even though my knuckleballing mentors all pitched well into their forties, I know I’m a lot closer to the end of my career than the beginning, and there’s unmistakable sadness in that. I’m proud of how we as a team battled this year, and how hard we played, no matter that there were plenty of times when we literally had more Buffalo Bisons on the field than New York Mets. I understand management’s decision to trade Francisco Rodriguez and Carlos Beltrán from a business standpoint, but, from a competitor’s standpoint, to lose two of your best players when you are on the periphery of the pennant race is tough to stomach, and I’m proud that we persevered through that too. From his first meeting with us in the spring, Terry Collins set a positive, professional tone and managed to be honest and forthright without burying people and losing people. He’s just a tremendous leader of men.
So I’m sad the season is almost finished, but I am determined to finish it well. Isn’t that what people remember the most? How you finish?
God, you’ve blessed me in so many ways this year, and I am so grateful for that. As I prepare to take the ball for the last time this year, please help me to be trustworthy one more time and to be in the moment every pitch, to glorify You in everything I do. Amen.
Fifty minutes before game time, I take an eight-minute Jacuzzi, then a five-minute shower. I say another prayer and head out to the bullpen a half hour before first pitch. I run a few sprints in the outfield. When I finish, I stand in front of Dan and he flips two balls into the air simultaneously, and I catch them. I do this before every start, bar none. I like to keep a very specific routine before I pitch, because it helps lock me in for the competition to come. I choose one of the two baseballs I’ve caught, and then I start to throw, first on the outfield grass, from thirty feet, then in the bullpen. I throw fifteen fastballs, then three cutters, three changeups, and twenty knuckleballs. I always end with knuckleballs. This is my routine and I don’t deviate from it.
JIMMY ROLLINS LEADS OFF for the Phillies. I throw two knuckleballs to go up 0–2, then follow up with my slowpoke, 61 miles per hour. He freezes. Strike three. I retire the side in order and do the same in the second and third. In the fourth, Rollins lines out to second, and the Phillies go down in order again. By the time I get John Mayberry Jr. to hit a foul pop, I’ve faced fifteen Phillies and retired fifteen Phillies.
The crowd cheers as I walk off. Whenever I have a no-hitter through five, I always make note of it. Obviously there is no guarantee, but when you are more than halfway through, well, you know you’ve got a shot.
When I had the one-hitter against the Phillies in 2010, it was in the sixth inning that Cole Hamels, my adversary again today, broke it up. I don’t forget that when I go out for the sixth inning again. Carlos Ruiz, the Phillies’ catcher, leads off. I quickly go up 0–2, but he works the count full. I throw three straight knucklers that he fouls off, and then I throw ball four. It doesn’t miss by much, but it misses. The perfect game is over. I have huge regrets losing a perfect game this way, but I can’t dwell on them, not if I want to keep going. I get the next two guys and now Rollins is up again. On the 1–1 pitch, he belts a knuckleball that sits up and drives it deep to right, way back. Nick Evans retreats to the track and gets turned around and somehow makes a tumbling catch on the warning track. The crowd goes berserk. I punch the air.
It’s still alive. Thank you, Nick.
The Mets have never had a no-hitter in their fifty seasons of baseball, a span of nearly eight thousand games, one of the more bizarre and inexplicable streaks in the history of the game. Everybody in the ballpark knows it, including the pitcher. With Nick’s play in right and the knuckleball I have going, I allow myself to think this could be the day. I follow my regular routine in between innings. I drink some water, towel off, and take a little walk. Hamels retires us in order, so the game remains scoreless and I am right back out there, facing Placido Polanco.
Polanco grounds out to open the seventh, and next up is Shane Victorino, a switch-hitter who has taken to batting right-handed against me after having almost no success left-handed. I fire a knuckleball for a strike, then he takes one for 1–1. I get the ball back from catcher Mike Nickeas and go right back at Victorino with one more knuckleball. It feels good leaving my hand, but it doesn’t have much dive to it. Victorino turns on it and crushes a line drive to left. Nobody is catching this one. It goes for a doub
le. The crowd stands and cheers me, and they stand for a good while.
I look up at the ballpark around me. I am having my usual resistance to being celebrated, but my awareness of it is helping me get better at accepting it. I stand on the Citi Field mound and feel good and strong. I don’t have to hide under the stands because people want to salute me and I don’t feel worthy of it. That’s ancient stuff. You don’t live there anymore, I think. You live here. So I just stand there and listen and tell myself: It’s okay to let these fans applaud you.
It is perfectly okay.
I give myself a few more moments to be sad about losing the no-hitter, then turn my attention to Ryan Howard. On my first offering, Howard bounces a ball up the middle, scoring Victorino. Two batters, two hits, and faster than you can say Tom Candiotti, the no-hitter and shutout are both gone. I am on the hook for a loss, and really sad about it.
On the bench in the dugout, I know I’m done if we get a man on, because I’m up fourth this inning. With two outs, pinch hitter Val Pascucci, just up from the minors, drives a home run over the left-field fence to tie the game. The dugout instantly fires up, euphoric that we’ve finally broken through and that the game is tied. Terry calls me back and Ronny Paulino pinch-hits for me and grounds out. I am relieved that I at least won’t get my fourteenth loss.
David Wright hits a double in the bottom of the eighth, scoring Ruben Tejada with the game-winning run. We win the second game too.
After the sweep, I walk back to my hotel room along a dark and desolate Queens street, elevated subway tracks overhead and Grand Central Parkway underneath. The trains clack. The cars rush. I wonder who all these people are and where they are going. I keep walking. I know for once where I am going, and know that it is God who is guiding me there.
In my hotel room, I call Anne to check in and see how things are at home, and then I write in my journal about the finish of my fifteenth season of professional baseball, and the quiet joy I get from knowing that I was trustworthy, and that I belonged. I write, too, about conquering fears and managing regrets and letting myself live in the present—not just on the mound, but everywhere; about learning to not worry about the next week or month or year, but rather to put all my energy into living the next five minutes well.
