The Conman

by Mike Murphey

  “Gee, I don’t know, Fred . . .”

  “Look, Conman, I need you. I’m forty-one years old, for Chrissake, and I’m gonna be the designated hitter.”

  So, for three of the final four games of the 1980 season, Conor played left field and hit ninth, behind Tuttle.

  “Got any advice?” Conor asked Dodd Morris, who played center.

  “Yeah. Don’t run into a light pole and don’t run into me.”

  Like every pitcher who’d ever played, Conor considered himself a hitter. He went zero for eight at the plate, though, his only success a walk during his second game.

  Like many left-handed pitchers, Conor hit from the right side to protect his throwing arm. He stood in the on-deck circle for his second at-bat of the season’s penultimate game, studying a left-hander on the mound. As he approached the plate, though, the opposing manager called to the bullpen for a righty.

  Conor stepped into the batter’s box. The pitcher fired a fastball Conor couldn’t touch.

  “Streeeee!” screamed the umpire.

  Conor stared at the label on his Louisville Slugger, and figured, what the hell. He walked behind the umpire and catcher and resumed his at-bat left-handed.

  The umpire raised his mask to his forehead. “What are you doing?”

  “If I bat left-handed, my baseball card will have to say I’m a switch hitter.”

  Tuttle out-performed Conor offensively by managing one hit. Batting in the ninth inning of a tie game, he dribbled a twelve-hopper through the infield, thus setting the stage for a storied moment in West Haven White Caps history.

  Conor stepped to the plate. The pitcher’s offering skipped past the catcher. Tuttle jogged to second. The next pitch was too wide for the catcher to get a glove on. Tuttle chugged into third.

  Visions of a game-winning RBI danced in Conor’s head. He swung and missed. He stepped from the batter’s box, gathering his focus. The next pitch darted toward his knee. He dodged backward. The ball tipped the catcher’s glove and caromed along the backstop, where it hugged the fence like a hockey puck skidding along the boards behind the goal.

  The first baseman and pitcher sprinted after the ball.

  “Come on, Fred!” Conor screamed and waved frantically.

  Tuttle broke for the plate.

  “Yeah, Fred! You got it!”

  Fred didn’t have it. Two-thirds of the way home he collapsed, landing spread-eagle on the foul line.

  “Aaaagghhhh,” he screamed, and grabbed at his right leg. “Hamstring! Hamstring!”

  The ball continued its roll.

  “Get up, Fred,” Conor implored. “Get up!”

  Tuttle rose to one knee, planted his right foot, then fell again. Still holding his bat, Conor ran along the baseline in foul territory where he stood, waving his bat like a curler sweeping his broom to smooth the ice.

  “You can make it! You can make it!”

  Tuttle began scooting along, somewhere between a slither and a crawl, his right leg dragging behind him.

  “You’re almost there, Fred! Keep going. We’re gonna win! We’re gonna . . .”

  Tuttle’s final collapse left his outstretched arm inches from the plate. The catcher received the ball from the first baseman and reached for the tag

  “Yerrrout!” screamed the umpire.

  “Mother fucker,” wheezed Tuttle.

  As a reward for his willingness to play outfield, Tuttle granted Conor the season’s final start against Buffalo, a team headed to the Eastern League playoffs. Conor allowed one run and pitched a complete game for the win. Kate vaulted the railing along the third baseline and hugged him.

  “You’re back!” She grinned.

  “Well,” Conor said, “I’ll be back somewhere. I don’t think I figure into the A’s plans, though. My numbers for this year are pretty bad.”

  She kissed him, and repeated, “You’re back.”

  Conor had packed most of his stuff. He only needed to shower. Anxious to get home, they planned to embark on their cross-country journey from the parking lot. As Conor shut the trunk lid, he looked along the right field fence toward Tuttle’s Airstream trailer. A light glowed through the windows.

  “Give me a minute, Kate,” he said. “I need to say thanks to Fred.”

  Tuttle stood, his back to the door, telephone in hand. “Yeah, let me talk with Walt. Yeah, Conor Nash. He threw great tonight. I know his numbers aren’t good. That’s mostly my fault. I misjudged this young man. I didn’t give him a chance.”

  Conor slipped beside the door and leaned against the trailer.

  Tuttle fell quiet for a moment, listening to A’s Farm Director Walt Jocketty.

  “No,” Tuttle said. “We should keep him. I’ve watched how he’s handled this all year. He worked his ass off. Nash deserves another shot. Yeah. Thanks, Walt. I appreciate it.”

  Conor stepped into the shadows and headed for the parking lot.

  “You’re right,” he said to Kate, opening the drivers’ side door and sliding inside. “I’m back.”

  They headed west, towards home.

  I pitched at Golden Gate Park, this time playing for Marino Paretti’s team. Aunti Di regarded it as a betrayal. About half-way through the season, though, she came to accept my choice, although she and Marino still screamed at each other every game.

  Financially, we were against the wall. We lived with Kate’s parents that winter. I worked mornings at the Filoli estate. Kate started a house-cleaning business. I mopped and swept and scrubbed during afternoons. At night, I supervised bingo games at a Senior Center for the Parks and Recreation Department.

  Although Conor felt comforted by Tuttle’s recommendation, he still held his breath each time their phone rang. Typical of Charlie Finley, the A’s existed in a constant state of flux. Anyone might be gone tomorrow.

  The call came on a January afternoon.

  “Conor, it’s for you,” Kate’s mom said.

  “Conman? This is Walt Jocketty.”

  Conor’s heart sank. A call like this in January couldn’t possibly be anything except . . .

  “Charlie hired Billy Martin today, and Billy wants to see all our left-handed pitchers. So, we’re bringing you to big league camp. We’ll re-sign you to a double-A gig and see what happens.”

  “I’m . . . what?”

  “So, are you driving again? I got a note here from one of Norm Kisulke’s old files that you got room to carry some equipment.”

  And there they were, Rita—a few more critical threads stitched into this ever-more unlikely tapestry: Billy Martin, a guy named Gordon Schuller, and a diabolical, life-changing pitch called the screwball.

  Scottsdale, Arizona

  1981

  Major League camp convened earlier than Minor League camp. Uniforms were newer, the food better, and the meal money a godsend. Major League camp is restricted to players on the forty-man big-league roster and non-roster invitees. For this camp Billy Martin invited every left-hander he could find.

  Most of the invitees stayed at a cut-rate minor league motel.

  I was napping just after noon when the sound of Susan Lucci screaming at her half-sister, and the acrid smell of marijuana smoke, woke me. I rolled over to see a blond-haired surfer-looking guy sitting cross-legged on the other bed, wearing jockey shorts and sucking at a bong.

  “Gordon Schuller,” he rasped without exhaling. “Nice to meet you.”

  “Um . . . same here.”

  Gordon expelled a blue cloud and raised the bong. “You mind?”

  “Um . . . no.”

  “Right on.” He drew deeply from the bong. “You watch All My Children?”

  I nodded. Most baseball players watch All My Children because most baseball players have nothing else to do early each afternoon.

  “I can’t believe,” Gordon said, “that Erica’s hiding out as a nun!”

  Gordon and I never pitched during a game that spring. Never. Not once. All we did was toss batting practice to the Major Leaguers and
throw in the bullpen.

  When minor league camp started, we thought we were screwed. Everyone there competed for a place on one of the teams. Martin sent the other left-handed invitees down. Finally, only a week remaining before the season started, Martin called us over. He hadn’t said a word to us all spring.

  “I kept you guys here because our hitters tell me you two throw the best BP,” Martin said. “I appreciate your patience. I know you’re probably wondering about making a team once we break camp. Don’t worry about it. Schuller, you’ll be our fourth starter at Double A. Nash, you’re the fifth starter. It’s all arranged.”

  twenty-one

  West Haven A’s

  1981

  Double A Baseball

  “Mark Brouhard says you’re a good pitcher and a good guy.”

  Bob Didier, at thirty-one the youngest manager Conor had ever encountered, had met Mark the previous year when he’d worked in the Milwaukee system. Brouhard’s career skyrocketed when the Rule Five Draft sent him from the Angels to Milwaukee, where he spent the 1980 season with the Brewers.

  “Billy says to give you a chance,” Didier continued. “So, you’re a starter. Show me something.”

  The West Haven White Caps, so miserable the year before, were history. They’d been renamed West Haven A’s. Sixteen guys from that 1981 roster eventually played in the majors. Conor Nash had the opportunity to be a solid contributor on a good team.

  So did Gordon Schuller. Sporting a mediocre eighty-two mile-per-hour fastball, Gordon, whom the Giants released the year before, consistently struck out eight to ten hitters every game. In particular, right-handed hitters struggled against him, which made no sense at all.

  “What are you doing with that change-up thing you’re throwing,” Conor finally asked his roommate.

  “It’s not a change-up,” Gordon said. “It’s a screwball.”

  I like talking about the physics of baseball. Explaining to Kate’s co-workers at Christmas parties why curveballs, sliders, fastballs and, yes, screwballs, do what they do is fun.

  I don’t know where the name screwball comes from. Like many baseball terms, its etymology lies buried in the pre-historic mists of our sport. I call it that because if I throw it right, you’re screwed.

  Conor raised his bottle and whispered a toast to the screwball.

  The physics lecture, Rita, goes like this: the natural rotation imparted to a baseball thrown by a right-handed pitcher causes the ball to move away from a right-handed hitter. Same for lefty against lefty.

  One reason hitting a baseball is so difficult is because any object thrown with considerable velocity at your head scares the crap out of anyone who has even a shred of common sense. A curveball or a slider thrown by a right-handed pitcher to a right-handed hitter leaves the pitcher’s hand along a perceived trajectory to impact some part of the hitter’s body. The hitter’s primordial fight-or-flight instinct tells him to duck. He has only fractions of a second to decide whether this is, indeed, a curveball that will break harmlessly away from him and into the strike zone, or whether it’s a fastball that might kill him.

  Managers like to send left-handed hitters against right-handed pitchers, and vice-versa. With this matchup, because the ball does not threaten decapitation as it leaves the pitcher’s hand, the hitter has precious extra fractions of a second to decide that he is safe and can hit this ball into next week.

  Hitters spend their lives trusting this science. Then, along comes a screwball and screws up everything. I think there’s a Bible verse, someplace in Leviticus or Deuteronomy, forbidding it as an unnatural act.

  As a lefty throwing a curve ball, I rotate my hand with a counterclockwise motion, as God intended. To throw a screwball, I must rotate my hand the opposite way, putting extreme stress on my elbow. Few pitchers even attempt the screwball, much less master it, because their elbows are their friends.

  Hitters, however, don’t know what to do when a ball moves the opposite direction it’s supposed to. Take a lefty who can throw ninety-plus, then arm him with a sixty-five-mile screwball, and you’ve created all kinds of possibilities.

  Each starting pitcher charted the performance of the guy preceding him in the rotation, so Conor charted each of Gordon’s outings.

  “You’ve got those guys falling all over themselves,” Conor told him as Gordon racked up his strikeouts. A groundball out or a long fly ball might produce the same result. Strikeouts, though, captured the attention of farm directors and GMs.

  “Show me one of those,” Conor asked Gordon as they played catch between starts. Gordon’s offering dove down and in so sharply, Conor didn’t get his glove on it. The ball smacked onto the top of his left foot. Visions of Fat Brad’s bloody teeth danced in Conor’s head.

  “Will you teach me?”

  “Okay,” Gordon said, “here’s the first rule. From now on when you open a door, turn the doorknob the opposite way.”

  Right-handed people turn doorknobs clockwise. Left-handed people turn them counterclockwise. This is the natural order of the universe. From that moment on, Conor Nash violated this rule. And, just as he’d thrown baseballs against a wall with single-minded purpose since second grade, Conor became obsessive about doorknobs. When confronting a doorknob, he seldom contented himself to twist it once and walk through. He counted three or four or five turns, as the person behind him—usually Kate—anticipated the actual opening of the door with the first turn and ran into him.

  At parties, or waiting to be seated at a restaurant, Conor backed himself to a door, reached his left hand behind him, and twisted the doorknob with a vengeance.

  “What are you doing?” Kate would ask.

  “Nothing.”

  “Yes, you are. You’re doing the doorknob thing. Stop it. People think you’re weird enough as it is.”

  Conor worked on his screwball every day as he played catch before games. He integrated it into his bullpen routine. Finally, he began to get the movement he wanted, though the ball seldom came anywhere close to the plate.

  “Try it in a game,” Gordon told him.

  “I can’t,” Conor said, recalling the hell he’d put his catchers through when he suffered the yips. “I don’t think I can get it close enough for Darryl to catch it.”

  “Ask him about it. Darryl’s good at blocking stuff. Sooner or later, you’re gonna have to do it.”

  The next evening, Conor worked a no-ball two-strike count facing Buffalo’s clean-up hitter. The A’s held a five-run lead. So why not?

  Darryl asked for a curve ball. Conor nodded—the prearranged signal that he’d try and make the ball go the other way.

  Conor knew when it left his hand the ball wouldn’t reach home plate. It dove down and into the hitter, as Conor intended, but it bounced a good twelve inches short. It landed hard and caromed off Darryl’s chest protector.

  But the guy swung at it! He missed it by at least two feet, then dragged his bat to the dugout, muttering and glaring at Conor the whole way.

  An inning later, Conor threw a screwball again and produced the same result. The ball smacked short of of home plate, bounced high, and the hitter almost fell over swinging at it.

  “We’ll call it your drop-rise,” Darryl told Conor. “First, it hits the ground, and they miss it on the bounce.”

  Kate and I headed home following the ’81 season, comfortable that an Oakland job waited for us. And for the first time, I’d get paid for pitching during the winter.

  “Bob Didier is managing a team in Mazatlan and he asked me to go,” Conor told Kate.

  “In Mexico? All winter?”

  “Two months. They’ll pay me fifteen hundred a month.”

  Kate was pregnant. They would miss each other. Considering they’d made only six thousand for the whole of last season, though, the money seemed too good to pass up.

  Their separation didn’t last as long as they’d anticipated. Kate received his call a month later.

  “They released me,” he said.
/>   “I thought you were pitching well.”

  “I was. They fired Bob, though. And I’m the guy he brought with him, so they fired me, too. I’m leaving for the airport now. My flight lands at ten.”

  “Senor Conman! Senor Conman!” shouted someone behind him. A man he recognized as some sort of team official trotted toward him.

  “Aqui esta su dinero.” The man handed Conor a stack of U.S. hundred-dollar bills.

  “Um . . . gracias?”

  On the taxi ride, he counted two thousand dollars.

  They gave me two thousand dollars to go away! When the Angels released me, I didn’t even get a bus ticket. So, I spent the rest of that winter pitching for Marino at Golden Gate Park, throwing screwball after screwball, trying to master a pitch that would rescue my career.

  twenty-two

  Scottsdale, Arizona

  Spring Training

  1982

  “John Wayne is a horse-shit actor.”

  Darryl Clay sat across the dinner table from Conor, his statement the next salvo of a day-long argument.

  “How can you say that?” Conor demanded for the twelfth time. John Wayne held god-like status in the Nash household. Hugh Nash revered the Duke and preached Wayne’s celluloid divinity to each of his sons. “He won an Oscar, for Chrissake!”

  “The Oscar was a sympathy thing because he was dying. John Wayne couldn’t act his way out of a paper bag!”

  Conor pointed his index finger. “I’m tired of this. You disparage John Wayne one more time, Darryl, and I’m gonna come across this table!”

  Conor and Gordon Schuller were assigned to Major League camp for Spring Training of 1982, again a part of Billy Martin’s ongoing search for left-handers. And, like the year before, they roomed at the minor league motel.