They Call Me Baba Booey

by Gary Dell'Abate

  I stood there as they announced the cause I was pitching for and then I lifted my arm into the air, showing everyone the ball. I always thought the first pitch happened fifteen or twenty minutes before the game. But the game was about to start. Players were running out to their positions. John Maine, who was pitching for the Mets that day, was behind me, getting ready. I had become friendly with him because he is a fan of the show, but his head was so into the game he didn’t even acknowledge me.

  I wound up and I swear to God when I threw the ball I couldn’t feel my body. Using a contorted half pitch, half push, I just closed my eyes and hoped it would go somewhere near the plate. When I opened them I realized it didn’t get anywhere close. In fact, it was so far to the left of the catcher that the umpire, who was standing four feet away and putting his mask on, had to put his hands in front of his belly to protect himself. It was a knuckler. The ball bounced off his fingers to the ground. The crowd went, “Ohhhhhhhhhh.”

  I turned my back to home plate, bent over with my hands on my knees like I was sick to my stomach, and then walked off the mound and gave a thumbs-up. The first thing I saw when I was able to focus again was Artie, doubled over in laughter. Ahhh, fuck, I thought. Mary greeted me right away and said, “Don’t worry. Are you bummed?”

  “I am so bummed you can’t even believe how bummed I am.” Then I had to look at Jackson. “Are you just embarrassed?”

  “You really psyched yourself out, Dad,” he said. I later worked up the courage to watch the video Jackson shot of the pitch. I could hear Jackson saying, “Come on, Dad, you can do it, you can do this.” Right after the pitch, all you hear is: “Ugggghhhhhh.”

  Many people have tried to evaluate what went wrong. But Howard’s father pinpointed the problem: I started to pitch it and then, mid-motion, I decided to lob it.

  I had thrown a bad pitch. I assumed the worst would be that I would get grief for it on Monday and that would be that. That changed before I even walked off the field. While heading up to the suite we had for the game I saw a kid I used to coach in youth football. “Mr. D., did you throw out the first pitch?” he said.

  “Yeah, I did.”

  “Wow,” he said. “You can’t throw.”

  Kevin Burkhardt, roving reporter for the SNY sports television channel, interviewed me later that day during the game broadcast. I thought he’d want to talk about the Autism Society, but after one question he said to me, “You threw out some first pitch.” Then he showed it on the screen for all to see again. “What are you thinking right now?”

  All I could say was “I was really hoping that would not end up on television.”

  After the game Hein came up to me and was being so kind. Too kind. I needed a drink. We went to a barbecue in Connecticut after the game. Everyone asked me how it went and when I said bad and they asked how bad and I said so bad, someone poured me a scotch. I was feeling a little bit better. The moment had been left behind at Citi Field in Queens. Until 6:25. My cellphone pinged and it was a text from my buddy Booker at K-Rock. “Dude,” he said. “They just showed your first pitch on TV.”

  “What channel?” I asked.

  “The local news on CBS.”

  Oh motherfucker! Are you kidding me? Okay, I said to myself, at least it is contained to the tri-state area.

  That night Howard and his wife saw the pitch on the highlights. Beth said, “He throws like a girl. I guarantee I could throw better than that. I’ve never seen a pitch like that.”

  Howard called me when I was already two scotches in. I sounded so bad he couldn’t even give me shit. He decided to save it for Monday morning.

  The next day was Mother’s Day. I was just moping around. “What is your problem?” Mary asked me.

  “Did you see what happened yesterday?” I asked.

  “So what,” she said. “It was an honor. No one else was asked to throw it.”

  It didn’t matter. All day I was trying to assess the damage. In the afternoon I turned on the Mets game. I wanted to watch the pregame show to see if they mentioned it. If they didn’t, it was probably over. And, much to my relief, no one said a word. Then the game started. And before the opening pitch the announcers said, “We have to show you what happened yesterday.”

  They saved my pitch for the actual broadcast! It was too good for the pregame show. I lost my shit. And so did Mary.

  “Are you going to ruin my whole Mother’s Day?” she said.

  “Yes, well, my whole life is ruined,” I said as reasonably as I could.

  “We are talking about a pitch!” she said, and then she walked out of the room.

  I had to face everyone at work the next day. As soon as I walked in I saw Will sitting at his computer. He is a big sports fan. I knew, in the split second that I saw him, that his reaction would be a good gauge of how bad things were going to go. And it was bad. He looked at me as if my parents had been killed in a car accident. His eyes showed nothing but sadness for me. I would have rather been teased.

  When the show started, Howard, who doesn’t care about sports, recounted a conversation he had had with his father the day before. It began harmlessly, with his dad saying he was just watching the Mets game. Then it quickly led into the pitch. Howard said how his dad told him that I had thrown “the worst pitch ever. I never saw a pitch like this in my life.”

  “Wow,” Howard told his dad. “This is Gary’s worst nightmare. I’m thrilled because we just found the first two hours of Monday’s show. It’s the single most embarrassing moment in the history of first pitches.”

  Then he just handed the show over to Artie. He was brutal. “I just saw Lance Bass throw out the first pitch,” he said. “Gary was so nice. He was doing this for Autism Day and threw it like he was autistic.”

  Artie’s a great storyteller and he told a doozy about an older guy who was an usher at Citi Field. I knew this usher from Shea. He’s a great guy and he happened to be on the field for the pitch. I noticed him talking to Artie and, afterward, the expression on his face was as if he had just watched the Zapruder film. During the show Artie added the dialogue that I missed while I was walking off the mound:

  Artie: “Man that pitch was so gay.”

  Usher: “That pitch was gayer than a guy sucking another guy’s dick. And I should know—I was a cop for years and saw a lot of guys sucking dick.”

  That hurt. A lot. I always liked that guy and I couldn’t believe he would take a shot at me like that.

  I was down, and Artie was pummeling me. I worried about my kids going to school and being made fun of. Even though they told me everything was fine and no one made a big deal about it, Artie said, “They’re lying. They are miserable.”

  It’s still a sore spot for me. But, on the air at least, I really had no choice but to take it. We’ve mocked so many people. When Chris Rock threw out the first pitch at a game once and it was less than stellar I destroyed him.

  Over the next three weeks, the video went viral. It wasn’t just that I looked so bad and it was embarrassing. It hurt my credibility. I’m the guy on the show who knows sports. I love sports. People assumed because I couldn’t throw a pitch, I couldn’t have a discussion about sports anymore.

  The world was divided into two types of people: the ones who were nice and tried to make me feel better (but only made it worse), and the guys who laughed at me and thought I was a fucking tool. Mary was in her own get-the-fuck-over-it category. The Thursday after the pitch I had to coach one of Jackson’s baseball games and I was afraid to warm up with the kids. I wondered if everyone was going to be looking at me funny. My saving grace was that a prominent married guy in town had just been busted for trolling for hookers online and was on the front page of the New York Post.

  For a month I was in a funk. The turning point came on Memorial Day. I was at a neighbor’s barbecue. Another neighbor whom I respect a lot and coached with was there, too. He is levelheaded and empathetic. He told me that he felt for me. He said he watched me out there every day
working with Jackson in the front yard. Then he told me that he’d played soccer in college. He was a goalie at a small school that had made it to the title game. Late in the game he lost his concentration for less than a minute, a few seconds tops, but it happened to be the exact moment when someone took a shot. It went right by him. “I was the villain on campus for a few weeks,” he said.

  He was the first person after the pitch who didn’t mock me or try to tell me it wasn’t a big deal or pretend to be nice. He just had a conversation with me about it. And he told me that one day I would feel better. He was right. Pretty soon I stopped thinking about it every minute of every day.

  And then, a few months after the pitch, I found out that the famous usher whom Artie quoted had actually never said anything. I was doing a Gadget Gary segment for the CW11 TV station in New York, and the usher’s son worked there. He came up to me and said, “My father never said that stuff. He wanted to call the show but decided not to because he didn’t want to draw attention to it.” Later that summer, when I was back at Citi Field for a game, the usher apologized and told me how bad he felt because he had never said anything.

  Not that I’m over it, nor ever will be. Whenever anyone makes a bad first pitch—Shawn Johnson, the mayor of Cincinnati, please watch, theirs are worse than mine—I know that a reference to me and the video of my pitch is coming next. I actually haven’t thrown a ball since then. I can’t do pitching practice anymore for Little League. And if I am coaching third base and the ball rolls my way, I just lob it back to the pitcher underhanded. The pitch has seriously traumatized me.

  In the winter of 2010 I actually got a call from someone at the Autism Society asking me if I would throw out the first pitch again in the upcoming season. He was really pressuring me because it would attract so much attention and raise so much money, but I couldn’t do it. I get the dry heaves now just watching other people throw out a first pitch.

  But some good did come of it. I put the ball and the jersey that I wore that day up for auction at a LIFEbeat charity event. Hein tried to keep me from doing it because he thought I’d want to hold on to them for sentimental value. “I never want to see these things again,” I told him. One of the show’s sponsors paid eighteen thousand dollars for it. He takes the ball around the country with him when he travels and, if he sees a celebrity, asks them to take a picture with it. I’ve got one of Tony Hawk smiling with the ball.

  I’m glad it brought someone some joy.

  I’D BE A LIAR if I told you that a week into my job with Howard I could look ahead and see where I am today. When I started, I loved working for everyone in Howard’s orbit. He and Robin and Fred were maestros in the studio, riffing perfectly and setting one another up for comedy gold. They’d only been together for a couple of years at that point, but they had the rhythm of well-trained sketch artists. I was just the interloper who had thirty days to prove himself. But I was determined to make myself valuable during that month. If it worked out, great. If not, maybe they’d still like me enough to recommend me for another radio job.

  The way the offices were set up, I sat on one side of the building near Fred and Howard. Robin was on the other side, in the newsroom. Because of that, I didn’t have as much interaction with her as I did with Howard and Fred. You could always hear her coming because she has that incredible laugh that filled the halls. But those first couple of years, she was the one who reminded me most of my mother. I didn’t know how Robin was going to react to me day-to-day. I remember one afternoon I got to work and Fred met me at the front door. “I hear Robin and Howard talking in Howard’s office,” he said. “There’s a lot of yelling and your name keeps coming up.”

  When Howard called me in it turned into a screaming match between Robin and me. I can’t remember what we were fighting about. Finally Howard said, “I don’t know what the fuck is going on but figure it out.” I was a kid in my early twenties and what I cared about most was drinking and hooking up. After I read Robin’s book, I realized she was actually doing a very good job of putting on a good face while dealing with a lot of personal shit. We get along great now, but sometimes I got on her nerves.

  Howard had created the kind of environment where everyone could be themselves and contribute to the show. He was so normal and funny and had such a good vibe, but he also had a very clear picture of what he wanted. He’d listen to all of our ideas, pick the best parts of each one, and incorporate them. I was used to working for Roz—someone who didn’t accept anyone’s opinions except her own.

  In order to secure my place at the show, I had decided I should follow Fred around like a puppy. I spent more time watching him than anyone else because he clearly knew a lot about producing radio. Getting to see him work every day made me realize that he was a much more important element of the show than a listener might think. Plus, I could see that he needed a hand.

  For his part, Fred wanted to show me the ropes so I could free him up to do more writing and segment producing. He knew that was why Howard hired me: to take care of stuff around the office so the creative people could be as creative as possible. If Fred said, “Hey, we need two baked potatoes and four ounces of turkey with no salt,” my attitude wasn’t Are you kidding me? It was I’ll get it for you as fast as I can. I could see Fred was getting bogged down in nuts-and-bolts stuff and it was keeping him from being creative.

  I watched Fred write some bits and Howard would voice them. Then Fred would do the background tracks for song parodies and harmonize with himself, layering one vocal on top of the other. Sometimes, if he required crowd noise we needed to make our own. Fred would grab people as they were walking by or call people from their desks into the studio to get a good buzz going. And if no one was around, he built the crowd himself, standing in different parts of the studio and at different distances from the microphone. He’d do a high voice and a low voice, then have the engineer layer one on top of the other until, like magic, you had a crowd of people where once there had just been a single guy behind a microphone.

  He was so technically sound, an unbelievable writer and producer. Not the kind of producing I do, but producing pieces, telling engineers how to make them. No matter how pressed he was for time—the show would be starting in half an hour and an engineer would decide that that was when it was time to take a break—Fred would still calmly explain to me what was happening.

  After working on the show for just three weeks I already felt an intense loyalty to it. The guys had really taken me in. All around me was this corporate environment—I was dealing with a station lawyer about a half-dozen daily issues regarding the show and I worked with music directors and the station general manager. But within the confines of the show it was very loose and comfortable. The only goal was doing something interesting and unique and entertaining. How we got there or who came up with the idea was secondary. Everyone found a way to contribute, on the air and off.

  One afternoon Howard decided we were going to do something that had never been done on radio before: convince a woman to get naked on the air. Just because none of our listeners could see what we were doing didn’t mean we couldn’t be titillating and push the envelope. He announced the contest, and we had three women call in who wanted to do it. It really didn’t take much convincing. I took their numbers, called them back, and set up the times for them to come in the next day.

  Before the show that afternoon, Howard pulled me aside and said, “Listen, this isn’t a circus, okay? I want you to put newspaper over the windows. Do not let anyone who doesn’t need to be in the studio get inside the studio.”

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  We went on the air. The girls were inside. And it was crazy. The way Howard described them was brilliant. You didn’t need to see them to get a clear picture of how good they looked. A steady stream of people—mostly the other young producers and assistants I had been working with for the past year—were coming up to the door trying to get into the studio. And I told all of them to turn around. That w
asn’t too hard.

  But then the lawyer I worked with every day came by. “I need to get in,” he said.

  “I can’t,” I said. “Howard told me not to let anyone in.”

  “I am the lawyer,” he said again, calmly but more forcefully. “You need to let me in.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because,” he said, “I am the lawyer and I need to see if there is anything indecent happening in there.”

  I don’t know where I got the balls to say what I said next.

  “Well,” I said, “you don’t really need to see if something indecent is going on. You need to hear if something indecent is going on. If you want, you can sit across the hall and listen on some headphones.”

  He was pissed. He stared at me. And then he audibly grunted and turned on his heels to go to listen to the show.

  Afterward I told Howard what happened. He told me I did the right thing, but two other things happened because of it: One, he saw that I had his back. Two, I saw that he had my back for having his back. There were no repercussions for what I did. And I realized, from then on, in any dispute between Howard and management, I was always going to side with Howard. If I had to put my eggs in one basket, without a doubt they were going in his.

  Even after that incident, though, I still wasn’t sure if I had a full-time job. I had been working on the show for nearly a month. And I was literally counting the days until those four weeks were up. I figured Howard and Fred were, too, and then we would have a conversation about how I was doing, what I needed to do to get better, and whether I had a long-term future at the show.

  The show ended at 6:54:30 on the dot and at the end of every day I would grab the drum and the cymbal and walk back to Howard’s office with him. We’d do some small talk about the show. But at the one-month mark I was too anxious. I just blurted out, “So, what’s the story?”