by Mike Murphey
Kate and Conor waited at empty Hi Corbett Stadium for Burroughs and a catcher. When they arrived, Conor put on his spikes and threw with velocity. His fastball tailed. His curve ball bit hard. And while he might have located better, he was around the plate. “That’s the way,” the catcher reassured him, pitch after pitch. “Hey, that one had some smoke.”
Kate grinned as he climbed over the rail.
“You threw strikes,” she said.
“Well, closer to strikes than I have been,” he answered, baffled at the mystery of it all.
“I’ll make some calls,” Burroughs said. “I don’t know why they let you go. I can think of a half-dozen Double-A clubs you can help.”
Winter bled into spring. Conor’s phone remained silent.
seventeen
Conor’s failure confronted him at every turn. The tires were so bad Conor borrowed money for replacements just to drive home. He and Kate moved into his mother’s house. He needed a job.
When Conor and Kate arrived at San Carlos, his youngest brother, who did not yet know of Conor’s release, shared big news.
“I made the fifteen-year-old All-Star team,” Dylan said proudly.
Nobody made the fifteens team when they were thirteen. Conor saw his brother’s sheer joy and mourned that he might never feel such enthusiasm again. He shook Dylan’s hand and grinned. “Good job, kid. Good job.”
As his brother dashed upstairs, Conor told his mother, “Well, at least there’s still a chance one of Dad’s sons will play in the Majors.”
“Yeah,” she said. “And it’ll be you. Dylan might have the ability, but he doesn’t have your heart.”
Conor hugged his mother and smiled at what he considered her naiveté. She didn’t understand—
The phone rang.
“You got your ass released? You said you were gonna play for both of us. If you’re going to play for me, you need to play a helluva lot better.”
“Hi, A.J. How . . . um . . . how did you know?”
“Fat Brad told me. He has an El Paso newspaper subscription so he can follow the team. You all right?”
“I . . . I guess so. I’m just . . . embarrassed. I feel like I let everyone down. I feel like—”
“Yeah, well, don’t do anything drastic. Brad and I will be over this evening. Meanwhile, tell Kate to keep you away from sharp objects.”
With her accounting degree, Kate soon found work at a contracting company. As my dad predicted, the poverty wages paid minor league ballplayers always forced me to work over the off-season. The past three winters I’d taken part-time jobs with the parks department, organizing youth sports and coaching girls’ basketball. Now, I needed something full-time.
“My dad knows a guy at the Filoli Estate,” Brad said. “He can probably get you on there.”
The Filoli Estate, set against a backdrop of the Santa Cruz Mountains in Woodside, California, had been purchased by the National Trust for Historic Preservation about the time Conor signed his first Angels contract.
The estate included a 36,000 square-foot Georgian mansion dating back to 1915, a sixteen-acre English Renaissance Garden, a seven-acre Gentlemen’s Heritage Orchard, and an elaborate system of hiking and biking trails. Conor loved the gardens’ beauty. He enjoyed working with plants, mowing the vast expanses of grass, competing in riding-mower races against other gardeners, tending to swimming pools and ponds.
They gave him a gun—a .22 caliber pistol he holstered low on his hip, like Marshall Dillon—to protect himself from boars, snakes and other varmints stalking the grounds.
“They have no idea who they’ve armed,” Conor told A.J. and Brad. “I shoot at anything that moves.”
“Don’t forget how much we need this job!” hollered Kate from the next room.
“I spent an hour today practicing my quick draw in the woods.”
“Shoot someone, and they’ll fire you,” Kate called again.
“You guys should come by,” Conor continued. “They’re filming a new television show about some rich family, using the big house and gardens.”
“So, you like it there?” A.J. asked.
“Yeah, I do. The grass reminds me of baseball diamonds. Today I thought about enrolling in school somewhere so I can learn more about grass and soil. I might get back into baseball as a groundskeeper somewhere.”
“You’ll get back into baseball as a pitcher,” Brad told him.
“Yeah . . . I don’t know. When they release you, I think you’re pretty much done. I haven’t heard of many people who—”
“Wait a minute.” A.J. cut him off. “Baseball didn’t release you. The Angels did. Last I heard there’s twenty-five other Major League teams. And they need pitchers, too.”
Yeah, but not pitchers with the yips.
“Guess what?”
Conor greeted Kate as he walked into his mother’s kitchen.
“What?”
“I saw Nancy Drew naked today.”
“You did not! I read the Nancy Drew books when I was a kid. Nancy Drew was never naked in her whole life.”
“No, really.”
Conor, assigned to clean the main house’s swimming pool after the Dynasty crew wrapped for the day, organized his chemicals and skimmers and poles. The woman who had played Nancy Drew in a television series walked from the huge house wrapped in a beach towel. She shook her long, dark hair, dropped her towel, gave a luxuriant, feline stretch, and glided into the water. Conor found himself suffering a momentary paralysis as she swam gracefully to his end of the pool, floated on her back for a moment as water cleared from her eyes, then gave a start.
“Oh,” she said, standing at the shallow end. “I didn’t see you there.”
A variety of responses tumbled through Conor’s mind. All he could manage was, “Well, okay.”
“I’m not trespassing or anything. I’m with the TV show. I play Fallon Carrington. Dumb name, I know. Am I in your way? I can always—”
Conor found his voice. “Oh . . . no. No. Take your time. I’ve got other stuff I can do.”
She smiled and back stroked in the opposite direction. Conor rearranged his skimmers and chemicals and poles. On her return lap, two additional gardeners trimming the edges of the lawn ambled over.
They spoke to Conor, their eyes glued to the nude Nancy Drew. “Hey, Connie, we thought you might need some help with . . . you know, the thing. The one that’s . . .”
“Um, sure. Here, hang out a couple of minutes while I . . .”
“Yeah. Yeah, we’ll wait.”
One more gardener stopped and sought a consultation with Conor about pruning when a shrill voice jolted them from their semi-hypnotic state.
“What is going on here?” Mrs. Barton, an assistant estate administrator, demanded.
Nancy Drew interrupted her laps. Again, she stood at the shallow end and brushed water from her eyes.
“Miss Martin!” Ms. Barton said. “Miss Martin! You can’t . . . we’re having tour groups . . . there might be children.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.” Nancy Drew smiled and pointed to Conor. “This nice man told me I wasn’t in anyone’s way. Well, all right. Thank you.”
She offered Conor a wave as she retrieved her towel. Conor considered returning the wave. Mrs. Barton’s glare made him think better of it.
Kate shook her head and rolled her eyes as he finished his story. “Why would she do such a thing?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t question her motive.”
“So, are you in trouble?”
“I’m not sure. It’s not like I tore off her towel and threw her in the pool.”
“But you didn’t tell her to stop.”
“Well, no. No. I’m not sure I could live with myself if I’d done that.”
“I’ll catch you,” Brad told me.
“No, it’s okay. You need all the teeth you’ve got left.”
A.J., who was better equipped to handle the movement and velocity of my fastball than Fat Brad, also volun
teered. I rejected A.J.’s offer, as well. “I need a break. Give my shoulder some rest. I’ll let you know when I’m ready.”
My shoulder felt fine. I just didn’t want my friends to know the true extent of my disability. I hadn’t told any of them about the yips. A.J. knew I hadn’t been getting much playing time, but he didn’t know the whole truth.
As I watched Jim Dial’s career fall apart, I tried being sympathetic. I attributed Jimmy’s failure, though, to some character flaw. For whatever reason, he lacked the mental strength to cope with the pressure.
Throwing strikes is a physical process, a combination of a dozen different muscular commands fitting together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Success is born of endless and precise repetition that muscles remember. And it works best when your brain just sort of stays out of the way.
You don’t reason with yourself. You don’t say okay, now I’m going to put this ball three inches to the left and two inches higher than where I put it last time. No, your eyes select a target, your body reacts, and some big ugly guy dragging a club sits down.
The brain complicates everything. Doubt, analysis, anger, fear are rooted in that lump of gunk sitting on your neck. And a strong person, by sheer force of will, should find the discipline to exorcise whatever demons were fucking with my fastball.
I faced a hard truth.
I wasn’t the person my father believed me to be. I’d been fooling myself all along. My self-loathing became merciless. I wouldn’t admit to friends and family that I didn’t possess the mental strength to defeat this thing. I wouldn’t play catch with anyone else, lest they discover how screwed up I really was. If my affliction could be beaten—if I could find the person I used to be—I would do it alone.
So, I took the bucket of baseballs that still lived in my bedroom closet and headed for the brick wall at the elementary school after work each day.
eighteen
Golden Gate Park
1980
“W hat the hell happened to you?”
Marino Paretti stood, arms crossed, fixing Conor with a curious stare. Conor had become accustomed to mound visits from coaches and teammates advising him through his struggles. This was a first, though.
Marino managed the other team.
The play at first base had been close, but not that close. Paretti charged from his dugout, alleged his runner beat the throw, kicked a little dirt, and, instead of returning to his own dugout, walked to the mound.
“Um . . . hi, Marino. I don’t think you’re supposed to be here.”
“I knew my guy was out,” Marino said. “I needed an excuse to talk with you. Last time I saw you pitch, you killed us. Like I said, what the hell happened?”
A baseball legend around the Bay, Marino Paretti had once been Billy Martin’s roommate when he and Martin played for the San Francisco Seals. For as long as Conor could remember, Paretti managed teams made up mostly of players from the University of San Francisco baseball squads during the Golden Gate Park League’s winter season.
On more than one occasion, that league was the salvation of Conor Nash’s pitching career. People called it a Sunday beer league. Indeed, guys gathered below the bridge and shared a beer or two after the game. That image, though, vastly diminished the league’s true stature.
Most area university teams played there during the winter. In an era before major league teams formed working relationships with Caribbean and Mexican League squads and sent players south of the border for winter ball, professionals kept their skills sharp through the off-season wherever they could.
For Northern California, that place was the Golden Gate Park League.
Conor’s first season there was the winter of his freshman year at Cañada. He pitched for the San Mateo Loggers, easily the league’s worst team. They went 0–22. Conor started every game and took every loss. Rosters of the other teams included names like Dennis Eckersley, Mike Norris, Willie McGee, Ricky Henderson—all local kids who, like Conor, aspired to the majors.
Lloyd Christopher, the Angels scout who signed Conor a year later, attended most of those games. Conor feared Christopher would lose interest. Christopher, though, did not become discouraged. “I saw you grow up that winter,” Christopher told him later. “That experience fostered a maturity I hadn’t seen before. Smart guys learn when they suffer.”
Conor stared into the searching eyes of Marino Paretti, then scuffed at the pitching rubber with his shoe. “It’s that obvious, huh?”
Paretti nodded.
“Well . . . I had a pitching coach who messed with me and—”
“Which pitching coach?”
“Wilbur Spalding is the minor league pitching coordinator for—”
“Stop,” Paretti said, raising his palm like a traffic cop. “Just stop right there. You don’t need to say anything else.”
“You know Spaldy?” Conor asked.
“Yeah, I know him.”
“I guess you could say he and I had issues.”
“Yeah, you and about a thousand other people on this planet.”
Over Paretti’s shoulder, Conor saw the home plate umpire striding toward them.
During his exchange with Paretti, Conor had shut out the ballpark noise around them. Now, though, he heard the leather-lunged bellows from the stands behind home plate.
“Get off the field, Paretti! Go back where you belong, old man! You don’t know anything, anyway! You’re the worst . . .”
“Marino, what are you doing here?” the umpire asked.
“I’m having a conversation with Mr. Nash, if it’s any of your business.”
“Conversation’s over,” the umpire ordered. “We got a game going here.”
“Talk to me after,” Paretti said, squeezing Conor’s shoulder for emphasis.
“Get off the field, ya’ bum! Quit bothering the kid! Get off the field!
“Goddam,” Paretti said. “That old broad’s been on my case the whole fuckin’ game.”
“I know,” Conor said. “That’s my Aunti Di. She hates University of San Francisco sports teams. And she doesn’t like you much, either.”
Paretti laughed, turned toward his bench and yelled over his shoulder, “Shut up, you old bag! Get back in the kitchen!”
Paretti found him after the game.
“First of all,” Paretti said as the grounds crew raked and watered and players headed for the parking lot, “you’re giving Spalding too much credit. I didn’t like the guy. And I’ve heard stories about his limitations as a pitching coach. But he got in your head because you let him do it. You have to accept your responsibility for this and stop blaming anyone else. Because if you broke it, you can fix it. Now, here’s what I remember about your mechanics and the way you used to throw . . .”
“Why are you yelling at your arm?”
Kate sat cross-legged on the elementary school lawn drinking a coke, watching Conor throw at the brick wall. Periodically, he shattered the beautiful summer evening with a minor meltdown.
“Stupid crappy frickin’ arm!”
His criticism would have been harsher, except he knew Kate didn’t like hearing him curse. He emphasized his disgust by smacking his left bicep with his glove.
“I’m yelling at my arm, because it’s stupid and worthless, and it won’t do what it’s supposed to do.”
“Does it listen?”
Conor threw a fastball and missed the chalk square by a foot. “Apparently not.”
“So, it’s your arm’s fault?”
Conor sighed, bent, and took another ball from the bucket. “No. It’s my fault, but you wouldn’t like hearing what I think about myself.”
“You’re getting better,” Kate said. “You still throw really hard. When you throw it over the wall, it goes a long way.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not trying to throw it over the wall, though, am I?”
“What kind of things do you tell yourself?”
Conor dropped his glove and sat beside Kate. “I’m pathetic. I’m
weak. I let some old guy goad me and shred my confidence. What kind of person is so short of guts and character to let that happen?”
“That sort of thinking is a big part of your problem,” Kate said.
Conor gave her one of those you just don’t understand looks and started to say something dismissive. She didn’t let him.
“You are not weak. You are not pathetic. You are a talented athlete. And you are getting better.” He looked away. She put a hand to his cheek and made him face her. “Did you like it when Mr. Spalding made fun of you? When he called you pathetic? When he said you’d fooled people into believing you were a pitcher?”
Conor dropped his chin to his chest. She clasped both of his hands.
“Then why say those things to yourself? What’s the difference between him berating you and you berating yourself? You threw well in Tucson. What was different?”
“Spalding wasn’t there,” Conor said.
“He’s not here, either. Besides that, what was different?”
Conor shrugged.
“Every pitch,” she said, “a professional catcher was encouraging you. Someone you respected offered encouragement and validation.”
Kate rose, dusted grass from the seat of her shorts and walked to the bucket.
“I married a pitcher,” she said, flipping a ball to him. “So, go throw at your wall and be a pitcher again.”
Well, it wasn’t that simple. With Marino Paretti’s tweaking of my mechanics, though, and an adjustment of my mental approach to both the game and myself I began to slog out of the quagmire. Along the way, I found another weapon. Never again would I allow someone to convince me I am not who I am. Never again would anyone’s opinion of Conor Nash’s ability outweigh Conor Nash’s opinion of himself.
