If These Walls Could Talk

by Jerry Remy

  This generation of kids are—how should I say this?—things happen quickly for them. They are part of the video game generation. They get information on their phones as it happens and I think they would much prefer to see a faster-paced game. I think baseball has to quicken the pace to hold younger viewers.

  Then we have the ballparks. So many of them when I played were the cookie-cutter ones, multi-sport facilities and not necessarily built for baseball. The newer ones are built for home runs.

  Camden Yards is a great example. It was the first of the modern stadiums and I think one of the most beautiful parks in baseball, but it’s a place where it’s fairly easy to hit home runs. I think a lot of the new ballparks, which are absolutely gorgeous, are built to improve offense in the game.

  My generation played in some pretty crappy places. I remember Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium, and that big ballpark held 80,000 people and 6,000 people would be there. Terrible places. They’ve done a great job with these new facilities that they’ve put up. It’s beautiful to watch games, all the seating is very good. You don’t have seats facing in different directions, like at the Metrodome in Minneapolis, which was built for football, and you’d have seats behind home plate, facing out toward right field. It was ridiculous.

  Playing conditions on the fields themselves are so much better than what we had. You know, the mixture of the dirt on the infield, it’s just perfect now. I’m sure there are some that are better than others, but when I was playing, there were a handful of fields you went to and you said, wow, this is a nice infield. Now the grounds crews come out and they drag the rakes over the infield every three innings. When I played they’d come out and drag it kind of half-assed by the fifth inning, once a game, so you were playing on a chopped-up infield for most of the game.

  The other big difference is the way injuries are dealt with.

  They immediately put you on the injured list, which is now 10 days. There was no such thing, when I played, as going down to the minor leagues for a rehab assignment. It was like, when you were ready to play, you were back. You’d recover and get back into shape with the major league team. And guys in those days were afraid to be out of the lineup because the money wasn’t what it is today, and you were afraid of losing your job. You didn’t want to be sitting on the sidelines. You wanted to play through some injuries.

  But they’re paying these guys so much money now that teams are extremely cautious with them, which I understand. It doesn’t bother me, but I think times have changed, especially financially, and the owners are protecting their investments as much as they possibly can now, especially with pitchers. In the past, that wasn’t the case. Guys would be out there pitching with bad arms and who knew if they needed Tommy John surgery? It didn’t exist in those days.

  I missed time with my knee problems, but I always worried about keeping my job. Going on the injured list was kind of a big deal back then, and now it’s just kind of normal. The manager calls you in, you go on a 10-day list, okay, be back in 10 days, take a little break, and they’re back in the starting lineup. Or they go down for a rehab assignment. Sometimes these rehab assignments drive me crazy. The guy’s making four appearances at the minor league level, where there’s really no need to do that. It used to be that, once you were off the injured list, you were back in the lineup. When you said you were ready to go, you were ready to go, and you played. So that’s a big change in the game right now, too.

  Another change is the way the manager interacts with the players. There was no such thing as “communication” back then.

  The old-time managers could never survive in the game today. They were the final authority figure. What they said went. You didn’t get to question anything. They were it. And you were afraid of them. It was their way or the highway. So that has changed dramatically and I think it’s changed for the better, to be quite honest with you, because you can sit down and have a conversation with a manager now.

  I think Alex Cora was a great example of that in 2018. He was always involved with the players in some way, shape, or form, every day, going and sitting with them in the clubhouse. You never saw that in my day, a manager come and sit in the clubhouse. You’d walk by their office and half the time you wouldn’t get a hello, or you’d just look and see if your name was in the lineup.

  Rookie manager Alex Cora pushed all the right buttons, leading the Red Sox to another World Series title in 2018. (AP Images)

  And there were a lot of fines that would hurt your wallet because you weren’t making a lot of money. If you didn’t make contact on two strikes, you’d get fined for striking out. Just different kinds of little piddly things like that. As great as those managers were—and there were great, great managers—it was their way or the highway. I’m sure certain guys were different, but not to the extent they are today.

  I’ll never forget a conversation I had with Dick Williams. He was with Seattle, and it was right at the end of his career. I was broadcasting at the time, and he was a guy I always admired because he was the first manager I played for, and I thought that he taught me more baseball in one year than anyone else, although in a very tough way. I remember going up to him in Seattle, and he just shook his head and he said, “I got to get out. The game’s changed so much. It’s not for me anymore.” He was kind of at that transition point where managers were starting to get closer to the players, and that wasn’t the world he had come from. Guys like Dick, Earl Weaver, Gene Mauch, all had a different way of going about things. They’d have no hesitation in sending your ass back to Triple-A.

  I think that’s what might have happened to Bobby Valentine in Boston in 2012. After the team fired Terry Francona, it seemed like Valentine was the best choice for the job. Bobby confuses me because I remember him as a player. I played with him for a very, very brief time with the Angels, and he was pretty much the same guy as a manager. Now, I don’t know what he was like with the Mets and Rangers, but when he came here he just didn’t relate to the players.

  He’d been out of the game as a manager for about 10 years and I think the game had changed and Bobby didn’t change with it. Maybe the years in Japan made him different, I don’t know. But he wasn’t close to the players, and then obviously the players didn’t like him.

  They didn’t like him really in spring training because he started to change a lot of things, with cutoffs and relays and how they were going to do things. A lot of players felt like, what, is he trying to reinvent the game here? That’s kind of the way they felt about him right out of the shoot. And I said, uh-oh, this may not be good as time rolls on.

  And I liked Bobby. I liked him a lot. I liked his enthusiasm. He had a passion for the game. But he was very strong-minded in things that he believed in, which didn’t really jell with the players in this particular timeframe.

  After the collapse in September of 2011, I felt they had a team that had a chance to win in 2012, and I was against bringing in a rookie manager at that time. I thought they needed a veteran guy. But it didn’t work out that way, and I was quite surprised by that.

  I guess the only thing you can really count on in baseball is that, like life, it’s always evolving!

  15. Depression

  The first time I battled depression, I was under a lot of stress from issues at home.

  I had been used to doing an 81-game schedule with NESN. The 1997 season was the first year that I did all of the games. Basically, that’s how it started. I don’t think I had suffered from anything like that in the past. I got really sick with a bad chest cold in Baltimore but went on to Cleveland with the team on July 18. I went to do my usual stuff in the clubhouse, which I did before every game. I was heading to the elevator to go back to the booth when all of a sudden, I started to feel flushed and sweaty. I felt pain shooting down my arm and I thought I was having a heart attack.

  I rushed back to the clubhouse and told the trainer at that time that something w
as wrong. I laid down on the trainer’s table and he called the Cleveland team doctor. The doctor came right over and checked my heart and said that it was fine. He said, “You may have had a panic attack.”

  I said, “A panic attack? I’ve never had one in my life!” I ended up going back to the hotel that night; I didn’t do the game.

  I continued to have these episodes. They just kept happening over and over again. Every place I would have one, if I even thought about that place afterward, I’d have another attack. I remember going to the ballpark and going to the booth and immediately having a panic attack because I had experienced one there previously. Even during the middle of a game, it would start up again. All this time, I was still working and doing all the games.

  I got really claustrophobic. I was afraid to drive because I didn’t want to get caught in traffic. I needed space between my car and the car in front of me, so I could get out of the way if I started to have an attack. This continued throughout the whole season.

  They got so bad, and I was having them so consistently, that they sent me into depression. I just felt lifeless; I couldn’t do anything. I didn’t want to get out of bed in the morning, and I didn’t want to get up the next morning because I didn’t want to go through another day like I just had. It was horrific.

  I finally went to see a psychiatrist who confirmed that I was having panic attacks. I asked, “How the hell do you get rid of them?” I started therapy but I’m not much of a talker, so I wasn’t buying into it. I was actually having panic attacks while I was talking to him about having them. After trying deep breathing exercises, none of which worked for me, he prescribed some medication, Xanax. I was apprehensive about taking Xanax, so I’d only take the pills occasionally. I was told, “When you start to have a panic attack, take the Xanax.” But that wasn’t helping because, by then, it would be too late. At the same time, I was scared because this was interfering with my daily work regimen.

  It got to a point where I remember getting up one morning, looking out the window at my home in Weston, and felt like jumping out the bathroom window. I didn’t want to go on like this, I couldn’t do it. It was just a brief thought; I wasn’t going to kill myself. But it got so bad, that’s how I felt.

  I went to another doctor who told me, “Don’t wait until you start getting a panic attack to take your medication. Take two pills every four hours, that will help you keep yourself under control.” That’s what I did. At the same time, I started to take an antidepressent medication, Zoloft. It’s trial and error finding the correct medication and sometimes can take up to six weeks before there is any improvement.

  All this was going on during the season, but I made it through. As I got on a routine of taking my medications, I was okay. I wasn’t having panic attacks as much and I started to feel much better.

  The second bout of depression was after I had my first cancer surgery in November 2008. The lower lobe of my right lung was removed. Everything was going well but in early January I developed a cough and was having trouble with acid reflux. With the doctor’s blessings, I went to Aruba with my wife, as I had just about every off-season. As the vacation went on, the acid reflux got worse and I couldn’t keep anything down. I was admitted to Mass General the day I returned from Aruba. I had developed an infection. My surgeon, Dr. Wright, and my pulmonologist, Dr. O’Donnell, were very concerned. Dr. Wright said, “I may have to operate again to drain the infected area.” They finally decided on draining the area with tubes and using antibiotics, so I was in the hospital for a week receiving IV treatments to clear the infection.

  I came out of that fine and I went to spring training, but I was very weak. It was the first time that I had cancer surgery and then I had the infection on top of it. I was probably not ready to go, but I started the season anyway. We had to make a West Coast trip early in the year. On the way out to California, I was fine. The next day—April 10, 2009—I woke up in Anaheim and I was completely zonked, I was out of it. It was the same day the young Angels pitcher, Nick Adenhart, died in a car accident.

  I fell into depression again because I was concerned that I wouldn’t be able to do my job. I continued on the road trip but I was totally miserable. I didn’t want to go to work; I couldn’t wait to get back home. I made it through the next homestand. I was a bit better but another road trip was coming.

  In early May, we traveled from Cleveland down to Tampa. I got so bad in Tampa that I couldn’t get out of my chair. I called Russ Kenn, who was our producer at the time, and said, “Russ, I’m a mess. I can’t leave my room.”

  He said, “What do you mean, you can’t leave your room?”

  I said, “I can’t, I’m totally depressed. I’m afraid to go to the ballpark.”

  He called Phoebe and she flew down to Tampa to get me. I was in such a state that I didn’t want to leave my room and I didn’t want to fly home. I didn’t want to be seen. I suggested to my wife that we rent a car to drive back home.

  She said, “What? What are you talking about? I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  I said, “I can’t fly. I just want to drive; I think I can drive.”

  She reasoned with me and we ended up flying home.

  When we did get back home, I had to call NESN and tell them that I couldn’t keep doing this. I was definitely battling depression again. This episode lasted for approximately six weeks. Sean McGrail and Joel Feld from NESN came to my house and they said, “You know, why don’t you come to the ballpark? It might help you break out of this.”

  I replied, “Come to the ballpark? I can’t even leave the house. I have no desire to go to the ballpark. I can’t do it. I can’t leave the house!” This happened a couple of times. Eventually, I did get to the ballpark. I got a nice ovation from the crowd when they introduced me and that did make me feel better. However, it didn’t fix my problem. I still couldn’t face returning to the booth to broadcast the games.

  The decision was made to start me on a new antidepressant medication, Lexapro. I realized then and there that I would probably need this type of medication for the rest of my life. I haven’t missed a day since. Thankfully, even with my personal and health issues, I haven’t had another problem with depression.

  It’s an awful thing to go through. In the past, I don’t think depression got enough attention. People were ashamed to admit that they had a problem. They didn’t want to be labeled as being “crazy.” Things have progressed and having a mental health issue is no longer a stigma. It’s a disease that can be successfully treated.

  I take my medications faithfully and I haven’t had panic attacks or depression in years. Those were two periods in my life that were really, really bad. I developed a new appreciation for people who suffered with these issues. Until it affects you personally, you can’t imagine how intimidating and debilitating these conditions are. Those two episodes of dealing with depression hit me hard.

  In many ways, it was worse than cancer. The cancer was always caught early enough where they could do something about it and so you felt okay about that. But the depression was something you just had no idea where it came from. There was no family history of it. I never knew when I played that I may suffer from this. I was always an anxious person, but to develop panic attacks and to have that sudden depression was stunning to me. It was just at a stage in my life where I never expected anything like that to happen.

  Looking back on it, I think maybe there were signs earlier in my life. For example, I was really moody during my playing days and shortly after I was done playing. I would be in just a horrible mood for no reason at all. I didn’t know why. I’d just get out of bed and I’d be totally miserable. This would go on for three or four days and then I’d be fine. There was no reason for me to be that way, but I never gave that a second thought. I thought it was just my personality. This used to pop up once every couple of months. I thought I was just in a bad mood. Now when I look back
on it, I haven’t had a day like that since I’ve been free of depression. I could never explain to myself why I felt that way and then it would go away, and I’d be fine. It could’ve been the prelude to some of these things that happened to me later in life, but I was never diagnosed with anything, and, quite frankly, never had it checked out.

  My wife had to suffer through my mood swings as well. I remember one time, I had been miserable for days and I came home after a bad game and I snapped at one of the kids for no reason at all. She had had enough and she laid me out.

  Phoebe said, “It isn’t our fault that you stink! You’re going to cut this crap out because I’m not putting up with it and you’re not taking it out on the kids!”

  Needless to say, I never did that again. I’m just thankful I was able to get it under control.

  16. Jared

  This is the chapter I never wanted to write. This is the chapter that Nick Carfardo and I decided to save for last during our deliberations for this book.

  There are so many legalities involved, so many lives were affected. It’s not an easy topic for me to talk about. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about what happened. I know it will be that way the rest of my life.

  The cancer, the anxiety, the depression—nothing compares to this.

  It’s so hard to write this: my son Jared brutally murdered his fiancée, Jennifer Martel, on August 15, 2013.

  I found out while I was in Toronto, where we were finishing up a road trip. I was actually on the bus heading to the airport when I got a call from my wife, Phoebe. I knew it couldn’t be good news, because she never calls at that time. I picked up the phone and she let me know that something had happened between Jared and Jen, and that Jen was in bad shape.