Imperfect: An Improbable Life

by Jim Abbott

  He closed his notebook, laid it on the passenger side of the front bench seat, and put the K car in drive. He would not return, he decided, for many weeks. In a matter of two hours, he’d come to believe this lefty was special. Hanging around through the season, getting friendly with the kid and his family, would only signal to other area scouts and their big-league teams that the Blue Jays were on him. Welke wouldn’t draw their attention. He wasn’t in the business of doing other people’s work for them. The other scouts, those who maybe believed in absolutes, would have to make up their own minds.

  Back in Berrien Springs, Welke started his report for the Blue Jays and their scouting director, Bob Engle. The draft was more than two months away, but he did the paperwork before his thoughts drifted into the next long stretch of road, the next kid.

  Under the heading ABBOTT, JIM, he wrote: “Left-handed pitcher. 6-3, 180. Great arm. Good changeup. Makings of a breaking ball. Natural cutter. Big competitor. Good athlete. Plays football. Good hitter.”

  Over the final line, his pen hung over the paper for a moment before adding four words: “Has no right hand.”

  Then he walked across the room and powered up the fax machine.

  SOME COLLEGE COACHES had their assistants handle much of the recruiting, and that meant covering most of the miles. Some employed pitching coaches.

  Bud Middaugh traveled, and Bud Middaugh was his own pitching coach.

  When he drove up to Flint from Ann Arbor in the summer of 1984, he’d been the head coach at Michigan for five years. He was in his mid-forties then, and you knew by the way he held his eyes on you that he expected ballplayers to be ballplayers. For Middaugh, you could play or you couldn’t, you did things right or you didn’t, and there wasn’t much in between.

  In Michigan and the surrounding Midwest, a college coach could drive for weeks and not find exactly what he was looking for, not like in California and Florida where the ground never froze, the gloves never toughened in the cold, and the kids played year round. Middaugh, like a pro scout, had to look across a field and calculate what a boy might look like in a twelve-month program such as Michigan’s. He called it “projecting,” which is what pro area scouts and cross-checkers did all the time, except Middaugh forecast a boy of seventeen into a young man of nineteen and twenty, which wasn’t a lot of time.

  Middaugh was in Flint on a tip from a Michigan booster who lived in town, who’d called to rave about this lefty on a local Connie Mack team. Sometimes you can trust a booster, and sometimes he’s somebody’s overzealous uncle. Mid-morning, Middaugh had put everything aside to haul that straight shot up US 23 to watch a game of summer ball. He’d first called Central’s counseling office to check on the lefty’s grades; there’d be no sense making even an hour’s drive if the boy couldn’t hack it in school. The lady there told him the lefty was a fine student and that she heard he’d be on the football team this fall. Football, too, Middaugh thought, and then he just had to see what this kid was all about. He’d never seen a ballplayer like the one the booster had described. Heck, he’d never even heard of one.

  Middaugh sat in the bleachers and watched the lefty pitch. He was a big, tall kid with solid arm action, Middaugh thought. He wandered along the chain-link fence on the first-base line when there was a runner on first, to see how the lefty looked out of the stretch. Could he hold a runner? He wandered up the third-base line for another angle on his mechanics. The lefty was throwing hard, he could see, but his stride took him across his body. Middaugh decided he’d get another three or four miles per hour on that fastball if he’d come cleaner to the plate. He wondered how coachable he’d be. As he watched, one thought did nag at him: Could I protect him? Those were big kids in the Big Ten and they swung aluminum bats. Then: Would they bunt him all day? Could he compete there?

  Middaugh didn’t take a note. He didn’t even carry a pencil. There was no sense letting on to other programs, to the pro scouts, that he was around. It was the game they all played and nobody had to know anybody else’s notions, least of all his. On a veteran Michigan team, he needed a freshman to walk onto campus and give him innings. A left-hander—a big, rangy left-hander with a hard fastball—well, that would be even better.

  On the hour back to Ann Arbor, Middaugh stirred in his mind what he’d seen. The big fastball, so overpowering Middaugh had not had a chance to analyze any of the breaking stuff. The kid hadn’t needed it. The slightly skewed mechanics. The composure. As he drove, he realized the lefty hadn’t even thrown an inning before he’d made up his mind. He knew he wanted him at Michigan. And he’d all but forgotten the kid didn’t have a right hand.

  BY THE SPRING of my senior year, the experiences of the previous four years—the spring and summer baseball seasons, the one season I’d spent on a football field, and then the interest from college coaches and professional scouts—had made me stronger and more confident.

  In early April, Middaugh had called on signing day and I’d committed to Michigan, my dream school, simple as that. Other programs had called—Central Michigan, Western Michigan, and Michigan State—but Michigan’s reputation, its aura, its uniforms, and its success were persuasive, particularly for a boy from Flint. I’d fold into a good team headlined by Casey Close, Scott Kamieniecki, and Hal Morris. And while Middaugh could not offer a full scholarship, the school would pay room, board, and books. My parents, who’d always preached education, would handle the tuition.

  In my senior season at Central, I won 10 games, three of them no-hitters. My ERA was 0.76. I struck out two batters an inning. I played first base, batted cleanup, and hit .427 with seven home runs and 36 RBIs. We were conference champions. In case I’d forgotten, the newspaper reporters and television crews were eager to remind me I was first a one-handed pitcher and then a ballplayer.

  It wasn’t just them, either. I’d pitched for going on six years in ballparks all over Flint, so the novelty of my condition had faded for some. Not for all. In a game against Bay City, a team we’d beaten easily, its bench had found a place to soothe itself in defeat—at the end of my right arm. I’d heard it before, tuned it out before. Still, I heard the insults, the familiar taunts. When Coach Holec came for the ball in the sixth inning, hoping to save some pitches for another day, I looked at him blankly. He held out his hand and I refused to place the ball in it.

  “Nope,” I said. “I want to stay in and pitch.”

  He peered over at the Bay City players. It wasn’t anything he hadn’t heard before, either. He understood this wasn’t his fight. It was mine.

  He nodded, patted me on the back, and returned to the dugout. I finished the game and left satisfied.

  LATE IN THE season, Don Welke fired up the K car and headed east. He drove past Flint, through Detroit and to Dearborn, where Engle, the Blue Jays’ scouting director, waited at the airport. The draft was near. They drove together to Flint. The lefty Welke had written up was pitching in a playoff game. Maybe a thousand people would be there and Welke wanted to make one more argument for the lefty, this time with his boss. Engle, in turn, would report to the Blue Jays’ general manager, Pat Gillick.

  Against all convention, the lefty was number one on Welke’s list of area prospects. That meant he rated him ahead of, among others, Barry Larkin, the slick All-American shortstop at Michigan. He’d introduced himself to the lefty on a previous visit, asked him his feelings about signing a pro contract, and been told the lefty’s heart was in Ann Arbor, at Michigan. They exchanged phone numbers, and Welke told him to call anytime.

  Welke arrived at Whaley Park with Engle, cased the stands, and spotted one other scout—a part-timer for the Kansas City Royals. In the din of the playoff game, the lefty struck out fifteen. Over the ninety minutes back to the airport, Welke and Engle drove in silence.

  Finally, as Welke steered to the curb in front of the terminal, Engle turned to him and said, “You’re telling Gillick about this one.”

  Welke smiled. There are no absolutes.

  In hi
s final report, he advised Gillick to sign the lefty. His worth in the draft, Welke advised, was $200,000. The first overall pick, a shortstop and catcher out of North Carolina named B. J. Surhoff, would later sign with the Milwaukee Brewers for $150,000.

  The night before the 1985 draft, Gillick called Welke. “Don’t change your mind on the guy,” he told him. “We’re going to take him.”

  Welke hung up and called the lefty.

  “Any other scouts talk to you?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “How about Detroit?”

  “No.”

  Welke called Gillick back.

  “Nobody else is on him,” he said. “We can take him anywhere.”

  The Blue Jays selected me in the 36th round, 826th overall—and 822 players behind Larkin, who went fourth to the Cincinnati Reds. And they didn’t agree with Welke’s assessment. They offered $50,000 plus a college scholarship plan in case baseball didn’t work out. The offer was more than decent. They flew me to Toronto to see Exhibition Stadium, pitch batting practice before a game, and meet manager Bobby Cox, along with some of the players. I was awed. I threw batting practice to the big leaguers, then shook their hands with the crossover, backhanded grip I’d practiced for years.

  On the short flight home, I told Welke what a wonderful time I’d had.

  “Jim,” he said, “I didn’t take you here to have a great time. I took you here to sign a professional baseball contract.”

  At the airport I called home. Mom picked up.

  “I want to sign,” I said.

  “Come home,” she said.

  I enrolled at Michigan in the fall. Before I did, Welke sat at our kitchen table. He talked about pitching in college, about protecting my arm. Don’t throw too often, he said. Get your rest. Avoid too many breaking balls. He shook my hand, and my mom’s, and my dad’s.

  The first time they’d met, Dad asked Welke what he should make of the interest from the Blue Jays. Welke thought about that, about what Dad was asking. He could see how deeply Mike cared for his son and that this was his way of being protective. Mike didn’t want his boy to be a publicity stunt. This was a delicate subject for Mike, Welke knew. It was delicate for him, too.

  “Mike,” Welke had said, “that’s the farthest thing from my mind. I think the guy’s going to be a top-flight major-league pitcher. That other stuff doesn’t mean a thing to me. Nothing.”

  Two months later, Dad said good-bye to Welke on the front walk.

  “Hey, Don,” he said, a smile coming slowly. “We might have taken a hundred thousand.”

  Welke laughed at the joke, waved, and drove off in his K car.

  As I prepared to leave for Michigan, it seemed that every banquet in the state had a Most Inspirational award. Dutifully, I attended. Everyone was very thoughtful. Even some of the Central coaches would attend, sometimes renting a van for the trips around the state, having a good time with it. Their support was meaningful then, just as it was in the daily practices. I’d find them in the audiences, still amazed at their capacities to believe in me, and the patience and faith it must have required. I sat beside the golfer Ken Venturi on a dais at a Detroit country club. He told me golf had helped ease a childhood stuttering problem and that he’d eventually overcome it. He looked at me like I’d understand.

  Near the end of summer, there was one more banquet, a charity event in downtown Detroit at the massive Renaissance Center. Lou Holtz and Sugar Ray Leonard were going to be there. My parents came with me. I even had my own room and a rented tuxedo. It was a big deal. Somewhere in that summer, however, my view of the banquets and the awards they handed me had changed.

  I didn’t want to be there and, once I was, I didn’t want to go downstairs. I didn’t want to be known for this, for something I was born with rather than something I’d worked for. I hadn’t done anything yet, hadn’t even thrown a pitch in college. And everybody was treating me—looking at me—as if I was something more than a high school pitcher. I wasn’t. The people were all very kind and well intentioned. Honestly, sometimes I wished they hadn’t been.

  Early that evening I went to my room to change into my tux and look over my public thank-yous, which I’d written on a note card. As I sat on the bed, thinking about the evening and the suit hanging in the closet, I thought I knew exactly what this award was for. But I wanted to win a college baseball game. I wanted to pitch in the big leagues. I wanted to win a Cy Young Award. I wanted to be more than a human-interest story.

  Something felt wrong about taking those awards. I began to believe that every story about courage over adversity exhausted a little of the momentum I had. I wondered why I could not accept the praise as it was intended. Instead, what I felt was not pride, but unease; they were not only dragging me into recognition of a birth defect, but I was allowing it.

  They called me courageous. I was a ballplayer. People called it more. I didn’t see it. They said what I did was heroic. No way.

  I searched for a defining sentiment. Was I mad? Was I bored? Was I impatient?

  I settled on sad. What I wanted on a Saturday night in summer was to be with my friends, far away from this. And I wanted to know why a ceremony, an award, and a round of applause felt wrong.

  And I began to cry. I wasn’t even sure why.

  Where was I headed? What was I becoming? I wondered.

  About the same time, Donn Clarkson, the teacher who’d taught me to tie my shoes so many years before, stopped for a hot dog at Angelo’s Coney Island on Davison Road in Flint. It was a place that fed assembly-line workers, judges, and everyone in between. While Clarkson waited on his dog, his eyes wandered to a photo hanging over a food case. Imagine that, he said to himself. It was that little boy with the prosthetic arm, but grown up, wearing a ball cap and a uniform. Near the photo, he read down a list of accomplishments, all that little boy had done on ball fields since he left third grade. He smiled broadly. Jimmy must be doing pretty well, he thought. Good for him. And he must come in here a lot.

  What I wouldn’t have given to have been at Angelo’s that night.

  JIM SCHNEIDER, THE long-time media relations man at Michigan, used to tell me that my story was about outstanding timing.

  I hadn’t been on campus more than a few days before I met Schneider, a man of unusual enthusiasm for the institution and its teams, even by Ann Arbor standards. He’d seemingly keep a pile of media guides in his head. Anything about baseball that wasn’t in those guides, well, that also was in his head. He also filtered the many media requests—the job Holec and my parents shared in high school—which for the first time I found daunting. I trusted Schneids to make sound decisions, and he was good at it. We connected over Michigan baseball, but there was more to it than that. He cared for me.

  Three years later, as I prepared to leave Michigan, he reminded me again of my tendency to land on the happy side of chance. I laughed with Schneids, who had a funny way of looking at things, and did not disagree.

  Those three years, beginning with my first day in the program and ending in the Seoul Olympics in 1988, were exceptionally gratifying. My mother’s words from years before—every step is a gift, she’d said—echoed in my head many nights. I never assumed another inch, not until it was directly under my feet.

  Maybe that’s what Schneider was getting at, too. My baseball was part desperation, part gift, and part providence. Maybe everybody’s is. Only I was the guy without a right hand, and great efforts were made to attach significance to anything that might have followed. I guess I thought making the high school team would change that. When it didn’t, the varsity letter certainly would. But then, none of the wins or the conference championships or the All-Whatever teams dulled a perception that something special was happening. The awards, the cameras, and the long stares from the other dugout didn’t make me feel special, they made me feel different.

  But, wouldn’t you know, stuff just kept coming. And, turned out, the harder I worked, the more people wanted to believe in me, an
d the more I believed in myself, the more often it came. That’s not to say the journey was without its crashes. It wasn’t.

  By the time he, Mom, Chad, and I packed the Chevy Suburban and made toward Ann Arbor for my freshman year, Dad was having thoughts that preceded Schneider’s right-place, right-time theories. Like there was some kind of plan for his firstborn. Already, parents of children with birth defects or amputations sought in me comfort for their personal challenges. I knew their burden. I sensed their fear, that their little boy or girl was headed toward a life that was less than satisfying, certainly less than they deserved. At seventeen, I hardly knew what to say, other than to smile and praise my own parents for their strength. They’d allowed me to fail. When I teetered, they let me fall, but strung the net. Those boys and girls were so sweet, their parents so scared, and I felt so helpless. How was I to articulate to them what I didn’t understand myself?

  If there was some plan, it was well beyond my reach. Instead, as the Suburban wound through the Michigan campus and arrived in front of Rumsey Hall, where the freshman ballplayers were housed, I was far more concerned with my left elbow. A long summer playing Connie Mack ball had left it sore. The season ended bitterly, both because I could barely comb my hair for the innings I’d pitched and because we’d lost at the end, costing the team—Grossi Baseball Club—a chance at the Connie Mack World Series in New Mexico. I was on the mound and suffered from a little wildness, a few hits, and a failed attempt to defend a double steal with runners on first and third. The defeat stung, and I bore the blame. My arm was killing me and I wasn’t sure what I would have going into fall ball. So, after dragging a trunk to the dorm room, claiming the bottom bunk, and considering my new home, with some trepidation I said good-bye to my parents. They were tearful, but I was so thrilled to be there, on that campus, part of that history and legacy, a Michigan man at last.