The look on my dad’s face, right then and there, might have been the happiest I had ever seen on him. That was it. All our time on the diamond. All those Saturdays in the den. The promise I had made to my mother. His dream and my dream, finally mushed into one.
Normally, Dad didn’t show much emotion. Once or twice in my entire life, he said he loved me. But standing out on the porch that evening, he gave me a giant hug. He laughed long and loud. Then he went inside and got on the phone, calling what seemed like everyone he knew, making sure they understood how big this was.
Within a few minutes, news trucks from Channel 8 and Channel 13 were pulling up on our block. Other reporters were calling on the phone. Neighbors came out to see what all the excitement was. Soon, moms in housecoats and dads in Bermuda shorts were giving interviews about what a nice, decent kid I was. My mom was happy too. But she remained pragmatic.
“Will the Mets let you go to college first?” she asked.
Dad and I both laughed. “No, Ella,” Dad said, “It doesn’t work like that. The deal is for now.”
Joe McIlvaine was a tall, geeky-looking fellow who had a short minor-league career as a pitcher in the early 1970s. By 1982, he was director of scouting for the Mets. Even though I’d been the team’s first pick, the fifth in the entire draft, and Joe was the team’s top scout, he confessed to me that he’d never seen me pitch. Every time he’d been in Tampa, he said, I was playing third base or outfield. He’d relied on scouting reports that local guys sent in.
But now his job was to sign me.
The night I was drafted, he called my house to congratulate me. He said he’d be flying down to Tampa, contract in hand.
Throughout the spring, quite a few agents had called the house, offering to represent me. Dad had met with several, but we didn’t hire any of them. He got on the phone and told Joe: “I look forward to meeting with you.” Then he looked at me and said, “I’ll handle this.”
Joe showed up in Tampa a couple of days later. Dad banished Mom and me from the living room. Through my closed bedroom door, I could hear Dad and Joe murmuring for what seemed like hours. But I couldn’t make out anything they were saying. Finally, Dad called me in.
“Son,” he said soberly, “we’ve still got some work to do on this contract. We’re a long way apart.” Looking at the Mets’ top scout, he added, “Forty thousand is not right for a fifth pick.”
“It’s okay,” Joe said, smiling weakly. His words were optimistic, but he looked worn-out.
Here was my dad, driving a relentless bargain with the head of scouting for the New York Mets. He was either making me rich or blowing the deal for me. I wasn’t sure which. But he was definitely putting the screws to Joe.
“I’ll go back to New York and see what I can do,” Joe said. “Then we’ll take it from there.”
“Good,” Dad told him. “We appreciate it.”
That was that. After the Mets man was gone, Dad motioned Mom and me into the kitchen. We all sat at the table. “Their offer is nowhere near where it needs to be,” Dad said.
“Everything else in the contract is fine,” he continued, suddenly sounding like a lawyer or an agent. “Except the money.”
I was confused. How did my father, who had a third-grade education and had worked his whole life at a chemical plant, know what should be in a major-league baseball contract? It was the same as the way I wondered how he learned all those pitching drills he put me through. Dad just knew stuff. I had my concerns, but I didn’t say anything.
My mother spoke up. “Dan,” she said, sounding slightly panicked, “did Dwight just lose his chance?”
“Oh, it’s all a game,” Dad said, not seeming at all concerned. “It’s just a game they play with everybody.”
A few days later, Joe was back in town. He took my mom, my dad, my sister Betty, and her husband, Harold, out for a three-hour dinner. Dad made me stay at home. I’m sure he thought I’d reach across the table and sign whatever paper the scout pulled out of his briefcase.
Joe raised the offer, but Dad still wouldn’t budge. “Not enough,” he told the scout. Joe left town again without a deal.
For a couple of weeks, the phone didn’t ring. I know because I sat by it for hours every day. “Relax,” Dad said. “They’re not going to drop the ball on the fifth pick in the draft.”
I wasn’t sure. I started thinking seriously about the University of Miami and their baseball team. “I’ll be the only guy ever drafted fifth who couldn’t make a deal,” I thought.
Joe kept returning. The offer inched up. But the standoff continued. “Good luck to you, Dwight,” he said finally, shaking my hand after talks with Dad had stalled yet again. “I’m sure you’ve got a bright future ahead of you.”
As I stood at the doorway and watched Joe walk to his car, I was ready to run after him, yelling, “I’ll sign it! I’ll sign it!”—if Dad didn’t tackle me in the yard first. I was losing faith in my father’s judgment.
My mom caught the look on my face.
“Dan, you need to go stop him and get this done,” she said firmly. Again, Dad refused.
In the end, Joe came back with one more offer. An $85,000 signing bonus on top of the $40,000 that was then the standard first-year major-league salary, which sounded like a huge pile of money to me. But really, I just wanted to play baseball.
4
Getting There
I HELD IT TOGETHER at Tampa International Airport as I told Mom, Dad, and Betty good-bye. But even before the plane pushed back from the gate, I was bawling in my economy seat. I don’t know what the other passengers thought, seeing this tall, skinny seventeen-year-old wiping tears from his eyes. But I cried until the flight attendant brought me a Coke and some pretzels. I had never been away from my family for more than two weeks. Now I was flying off to start a full season of New York Mets rookie ball in Kingsport, Tennessee. I was excited. My dream was coming true. But I couldn’t have been any more homesick if I was moving to China.
The Kingsport Mets played in a converted high school stadium with a falling-down left-field fence. I moved into the owner’s basement. Slowly, I figured out that the Dominican players really didn’t speak English. They weren’t just messing with me. Dad told me I couldn’t spend the bonus money right away. I survived on the $2.50 dinner specials at Kentucky Fried Chicken. The guys on the team were friendly enough. My old pal Floyd Youmans was there from Belmont Heights Little League and Hillsborough High. He’d been drafted right behind me, in round two.
The night of the draft, Floyd had called me to say he’d been drafted. “By who?” I asked. When he told me “the Mets,” I figured he’d heard that I’d been drafted by New York and he was pulling my leg. “Yeah? That’s great,” I said, playing along. “What round?” He told me the Mets had picked him in the second round and I quickly countered that I’d gone in the first. Since Floyd hadn’t been watching a live feed and I’d left the Trib office right after my name came on the screen, it took us a few days to figure out that both stories were real. And now we were teammates again. Together we didn’t exactly burn up the Appalachian League, finishing the 1982 season at 28–40, good enough for last place. Compared with my teammates, I played really well. I made the Appalachian League All-Star Game. But I was still so shy and homesick, even with Floyd around, most nights I couldn’t wait to call my family.
“Son, you gotta stop calling so often,” my dad finally said. “The phone bills are sky-high.”
Then Mom got on the phone and whispered, “Call as much as you need. Don’t worry about that old fool.” For once, Dad was the hard-ass and Mom was the softie.
Kingsport was where I first met Davey Johnson, then a roving instructor for the Mets organization. I think I impressed him with my knowledge of the game. Davey saw me in the bullpen one day positioning the catcher outside, then inside, then down the middle, so I could hit my chosen spots with my curveball.
“How the hell do you know all that?” he asked me.
“My dad taught me,” I said. Then I proceeded to show Davey the different grips I used to make the ball dance and dive. I think that stuck with him.
There wasn’t much glamour in rookie ball, but I could tell the Mets higher-ups were keeping an eye on their first-round draft pick. When I begged our manager, Ed Olsen, to let me pinch-hit in extra innings one day, Ed said sure. I didn’t come close to getting on base. And when the game report landed in New York, word bounced back immediately from the team’s front office: “What the hell are you guys doing down there?”
They didn’t want their top pitching prospect facing some fastballing teenager with no control. I had a total of one at bat that year.
There was no fighting it anymore. I was a pitcher for good.
At the end of that rookie ball season, my father finally let me dip into the bonus money. I replaced my ratty ’74 Duster with a silver 1983 Chevrolet Camaro Z28 with a four-speed automatic transmission and Crossfire 305 V8, detailed to my precise specifications. That car had tinted windows, fancy rims, Playboy Bunny decals, and “Mr. Dwight” painted on the doors. I went all out. I drove to Lynchburg, Virginia, home of the high-A Lynchburg Mets of the Carolina League, to start the 1983 season. I didn’t have major-league swagger. I was still a couple of A’s away from the bigs. Bringing home $245 every two weeks, I could barely afford to buy gas. But a young black man cruising around drowsy Lynchburg in a car like that—let’s just say I didn’t go unnoticed. I was beginning—beginning—to look the part of a professional athlete.
Too bad I didn’t pitch like one.
The Camaro-driving first-rounder got off to a miserable 0–3 start. I wasn’t getting anybody out. Soon enough, there was talk of bouncing me back to the single-A Mets farm team in Little Falls, New York. My career had barely started, and I already seemed to have hit a wall.
Luckily, our pitching coach was John Cumberland, a real gruff talker who’d had a short throwing career with the Yankees and the Giants. He ranted. I threw.
“Blowing your fastball by chumps in high school and rookie ball isn’t working here,” Cumberland announced during our first morning session.
“Okay,” I answered. Cumberland barely took a breath.
“Guys here have faster bats, and your only location is right down the middle. They’re sitting back, drooling, waiting to crush the hell out of the ball.”
“I—”
“You’ve got a shitload of talent that’s gonna go right into the sewer,” Cumberland said. “So you know what you gotta do now, don’t ya, Doc?”
“What?”
“The only thing you can do,” he said, looking at me like I was in the back of the slow class. “You gotta put the fear of God into these sons-of-bitches! Christ, kid, you’re throwing in the mid-90s. Scare ’em!”
I just nodded.
“From now on, anytime a guy gets a base hit off of you, the next guy up to bat, you knock his ass down. If a guy hits a home run off you, the next guy up gets drilled. Hit him.”
I’d never pitched that way before. Frankly, it made me a little uncomfortable. Was he saying “Hit batters on purpose?” I guess he kinda was. But prior to that, I had no strategy of intimidation. Growing up, I relied on straight heat and controlling my curveball. Those were the two pitches I had, and that was enough.
I felt a little guilty the first few times I placed the fear of Jesus into a couple of opposing batters and nailed a couple more. I was not a naturally aggressive person. If anything, I’d always been a little shy. But Nice Guy Dwight really was becoming a different person on the pitching mound. I was playing on a whole new level. I knew I had to do something. I told myself, “Maybe this is just how it’s done around here.”
The Cumberland School of Batter Intimidation changed everything. “A little chin music goes a long way,” the pitching coach said. The other teams got the message: “Don’t mess with Doc.”
After a few super-aggressive outings, Cumberland had me dial back. Pitching hard and inside opened up my game a lot, and I kept doing it throughout the summer. The results were hard to miss. All the hitters were more cautious with me.
In May, we drove up to the big town for an exhibition game at Shea Stadium against the Salem Redbirds, the San Diego Padres A-ball team in the Carolina League. And I was going to pitch. We were the opening act before a regular Mets-Padres game. I’d seen major leaguers play at spring training in Florida, but I’d never set foot in a real major-league stadium before.
Shea seemed amazing to me. Just the size of it was staggering. I was in total awe. TV did not do it justice. I know some people ragged on Shea, saying it lacked grandeur, that it wasn’t as impressive as some big-league parks. Well, to me, this was a cathedral of baseball. The field was nicer than anything I’d ever seen before, perfectly manicured and perfectly level. There were maybe four thousand people in the stands when we first took the field.
But as I was taking a measure of the scene around me, New York was also measuring me. The Mets’ first-round draft choice had brought his stuff to New York, and all the sportswriters wanted to see. Was he really worth the hype? I had nothing on my mind but total domination.
I pitched well. I struck out fourteen batters. I had a one-hitter going, but I blew the game in the ninth. I gave up a couple of hits and then a home run, and then I nailed a batter with a ball in the neck. By the time the trainer came to look at the stunned batter, our manager, Sam Perlozzo, was on the mound, pulling me from the game. I felt horrible as I walked back to the showers. Joe McIlvaine, the Mets scouting director who had signed me, came into the locker room with a big smile on his face. “No reason to be down,” he said. “You impressed a lot of people today.”
“I should have won,” I told him. “I won’t lose another game this season. Why couldn’t I win here?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Joe said.
I wasn’t worried. I was just mad at myself. This was my first shot at Shea, and I felt like I’d blown it. Weren’t we supposed to win? Wasn’t I supposed to win? I went back to Lynchburg and won every game I pitched after that.
Some weekends, Carlene came up from Florida, and that was fun. I didn’t consider us too serious, and neither did she. When Carlene wasn’t around, my roommate Darryl Denby and I would stroll through the mall, wearing our Lynchburg Mets jackets and hats, hoping to meet girls. You’d have to call our success rate “very hit or miss.” Something else happened in Lynchburg that didn’t seem important at the time. Living on my own, I discovered the pleasures of alcohol, especially forty-ounce bottles of Schlitz Malt Liquor. Other guys on the team would go out and shoot pool at night or come home from a game, order a pizza, and smoke some weed. Some guys would even smoke pot on road trips, then hit those southern truck stop buffets and put away four thousand calories for five bucks.
I wasn’t into pot. Getting high just made me sleepy. I didn’t get the thrill. But I liked the way those forties loosened me up and made me more social. I’d been sneaking Budweisers from my dad’s refrigerator since I was in my early teens. I wasn’t a frequent drinker then, and I didn’t drink that much when I drank. I don’t think I’d ever tried malt liquor before. Now that I had, I liked it. It had a higher concentration of alcohol than regular beer, delivering some extra bang for our minor-league bucks. I can honestly say I kept my drinking mostly under control. I told myself that drinking was just a part of growing up, like meeting girls and making money. Weren’t other kids my age off at college, going to parties, and exploring their independence? I’d skipped my chance to go to Miami, but these were my college days. Still, I knew enough not to let my mom and dad know I’d started drinking regularly—especially malt liquor. My dad, the Bud man, would definitely have frowned on me hitting the hard-core stuff.
One night before a road trip, three or four girls were at our apartment until three a.m., laughing and drinking. None of the ladies stayed over, but Darryl and I definitely lost track of the time. Across the street, our team bus was leaving at eight a.m. sharp for Mar
yland and a game with the Hagerstown Suns, a Baltimore Orioles affiliate. Darryl and I knew all along that we’d be tired. But we were having fun, and we figured we could get some rest on the bus. The malt liquor was flowing, and I guess you could say we were negotiating with ourselves.
Bad idea.
We didn’t wake up until 8:40. I looked out the window at the stadium parking lot. The bus was gone. I jumped out of bed and started throwing pieces of my uniform into a duffel bag.
“Darryl!” I yelled down the hall. “We fucked up!”
From his room, all I heard was a groan. Then, “What the hell?” as his senses kicked in. “Why didn’t the Dominicans wake us up?”
We jumped into the Camaro and raced to Hagerstown, getting lost in our panic on the way. Three hours later, we arrived at Municipal Stadium. The game was in the fourth inning. And there was no way to sneak in quietly. The only way to get to our team was to enter the field near third base and trot to the visitors’ dugout on the first base side. We waited in the stands for just the right moment, a couple of sheepish guys in full Mets uniforms. At the break in the inning, hoping no one would notice, we jogged right across the field. I’ve done some embarrassing things since then, things worse than that. But at that point in my life, this took the cake. Even Sam, our even-keeled manager, blew up at that.
Joe McIlvaine called from New York. He was fairly calm under the circumstances. “We need to be sure that you know why you’re there, okay?” Joe said when he got me on the phone.
“It won’t happen again,” I said, and I meant it. That was another one I never mentioned to my dad.
That was the first time I ever remember alcohol interfering with me doing my job. I was sure it was a onetime slip-up, and for a while it was.
Sam came up to me at least once a week and said, “One more start and you’re going up to double-A.” Then it wouldn’t happen. Week after week, he said that, and I didn’t get called up.
Doc: A Memoir Page 5
