Imperfect: An Improbable Life

by Jim Abbott

  Mom lingered in her hug and tears. Proud of me but anguished over letting me go, she was hardest to part with. In the years that followed, I’d conjure that image of her many times. I wanted to please and protect her, especially after I left home. Dad could be more difficult to satisfy, but, often, Mom’s expectations drove me harder.

  The University of Michigan was a huge place, all bricks and people, promise and nerves. In the courtyard outside the dorm, I met my roommate, a freshman infielder from Toledo, Jim Durham. Freshman girls mingled nearby. I hadn’t much experience in that area, where I assumed a girl who liked me would have to be somewhat forgiving. Generally, my strategy was to let them come to me, which wasn’t going all that great, but I thought probably saved me from a lot of humiliation.

  As I ventured away from West Quad, a large square building with four halls—one of them Rumsey, built nearly fifty years before—on the perimeter, the size of the job ahead grew. The other freshmen—both in the classrooms and on the ball field—seemed so accomplished. The notion of competing with them in either arena was daunting, but inspiring. For a kid from Central, it was cool, like stepping into a world where just enough wasn’t going to be near enough. I assumed I’d gotten a good education in Flint, then sat in the classrooms, listened to the conversations, tried to process the words, and thought, “Man, where the heck did you people learn all this stuff?”

  My arm began to feel better. Maybe it was the excitement or the new jersey and cleats, but I was healthy, and then started to become the pitcher I would be. I had a cut fastball, though I didn’t know it at the time and never called it that. It was just my fastball and naturally it would run toward right-handed hitters, though sometimes—and unpredictably—it wouldn’t. I had a pitch that would sink on the left side of the plate. A slow curveball came and went. Following an afternoon practice during which the curveball was rather good, Middaugh and I studied videotape of the throwing session, trying to reconstruct the mechanics that had made it effective. In spite of numerous rewatchings, the curveball remained something of a mystery, and then blended into a slider, developed after reading in a book how Tom Seaver threw his. I began lowering my arm angle—somewhere around three-quarters—against lefties and righties, which became effective.

  Practices were held at Ray Fisher Stadium, which hosted its first collegiate baseball game in 1923. Michigan beat Ohio State, 3–2, in a game that, appropriately enough, was called after five innings because of rain. Occasionally we’d throw from the main mound of the ballpark. The surrounding stands were old, tall, and made of steel, extending from first to third base. When they were empty, the sound of the ball hitting the catcher’s mitt was loud, authoritative, bringing a sense of great velocity. Middaugh was changing my mechanics, which I’d shadow practice in my dorm room, in the hallway outside his office, eventually even in airport gate areas. I was throwing harder, beginning to command my pitches and starting to believe I could pitch well enough to help the team.

  I was also having a pretty good time. The incoming freshmen ballplayers were talented and, well, free-spirited. I became close with most of them, guys such as Chris Lutz, Doug Kaiser, Billy St. Peter, Darren Campbell, Mike Gillette, and Durham. Coming from Flint, I was no angel myself. But these guys were especially adept at making a good time where there wasn’t one. If there wasn’t trouble to be had, they’d often enough make their own. St. Peter, who’d go on to spend four years in the Chicago Cubs organization before making his name as a pro walleye fisherman, was especially gifted in that area. We’d had a couple beers one night when we discovered a duck pond behind a fraternity. St. Peter captured a duck and with great pride carried it from party to party like it was a living, breathing, irritated man purse. When the duck smelled freedom back at the dorm, it made a dash for it, just ahead of six of us who hounded it through the hallways. This is where our senses of humor tended to run, and they ran a lot.

  A few weeks into the semester, I was having the time of my life. I kept thinking about the movie The Big Chill, and understanding why the characters thought so highly of their years at Michigan. The football team opened with a win against Notre Dame and lost once all season. There seemed to be a party on every corner. Bruce Springsteen and Pink Floyd were on my headphones, providing escape when I needed it. I didn’t even mind the dorm food. And by spring, I was learning how to pitch.

  We won 47 games my freshman season, of which I was the winning pitcher in six, and during which Schneids began developing his right-place, right-time principle. My first collegiate win was against North Carolina. After a couple rocky early starts, I came in in relief against the Tar Heels in a tie game. Two were out and a runner was at third. On a return throw from the catcher, I heard something from my right, glimpsed a commotion near third base. The coach was urging the runner to “go, go, go.” And he was gesturing. The runner made for the plate.

  Later, my coaches and teammates would agree that the tactic was unseemly and bush league. To me, it was baseball. My baseball. Trying to steal a run on my glove switch was no different from having the first eight batters in a lineup lay down bunts, which happened once in Little League. (The first batter reached base, the next seven didn’t.) It was no different from taunting me from the dugout, which was routine. The game and my hand’s place in it were metaphoric like that. Like life, baseball would go along as usual, me riding along, and then with the slightest tilt there’d be seventeen players on one side of the field and me on the other. I was different, and always was.

  Yet, to have it happen here, in college, in a game of Division I powers, and with everyone watching and judging, was unsettling. Middaugh had called upon me for a big out and I stood on the mound calming my nerves and thinking of my mechanics, barely aware that I might be vulnerable. It was the perfect play.

  As the players on our bench shouted an alarm, I caught the ball, made the switch, and threw out the runner by ten feet. In Michigan’s half of the inning, Casey Close singled and Hal Morris hit a home run to right field that landed in the parking lot of a car dealership. Then Close, a senior who’d given up pitching in order to specialize as an outfielder—and batted .440 with 19 home runs as a result, and was named Baseball America’s national player of the year—was summoned to pitch for one of only two times that season. He got the last nine Tar Heels in order. By the end, it seemed the coaching staff and my teammates were determined to punish North Carolina for its temerity.

  I appreciated the support. It was kind of them. I’d been ecstatic to get the out, to get us off the field still tied. But sitting in the dugout afterward, I was embarrassed. What must my teammates be thinking of me? Would this be a constant ploy over the season? Surely, one guy thrown out at the plate hadn’t answered all the questions for them or for me. Was this what it was going to be like from now on? Already, Middaugh and I had spent dozens of hours drilling on bunt plays. And still he’d have the first and third basemen play closer when I pitched, which meant hard-hit balls down the lines had less chance of being caught and middle infielders had to cover more ground.

  Now this.

  I scraped at the dugout floor with my cleat. I was different. There was no getting around it, and there wasn’t much use pretending otherwise.

  Middaugh tapped me on the shoulder.

  “Nice job,” he said.

  I wondered.

  The experience at Michigan went that way: Personal and athletic growth followed subtle indignities that I tried to keep to myself. Probably no one noticed, but I couldn’t be sure.

  The season ended for me with a long relief appearance against Minnesota in the Big Ten tournament, a live fastball, a lot of strikeouts, and a team win. After trying to find my way, reworking my delivery, adapting to the best baseball I’d ever competed against, I was getting more comfortable. Through the usual internal bouts with confidence, and as games and time passed, I was becoming pretty sure I belonged.

  The feeling grew over the summer, which I split between arranging Anheuser-Busch products
in markets for Dad’s beer distributorship and pitching for an Ann Arbor summer league team with some of my Michigan teammates. In my final start before my sophomore year, in front of a sellout crowd in a wonderful old ballpark—Point Stadium in Johnstown, Pennsylvania—I pitched one of the better games of my life. So, into fall ball and then into spring, the anxiety that chased me onto campus a year before had mostly dissolved. I was in the right place, and at the right time, like Schneider said.

  The 1987 team won 52 games and lost 12. We won another Big Ten championship. We lost again in the NCAA regional. And I won 11 games. The Golden Spikes Award, the first given to a pitcher, followed from that season, as did a place on the USA Baseball team, which traveled most of the summer, including to Cuba.

  The game already had taken me to many places, but there was nothing quite like the Cuban experience.

  Fidel Castro was larger than I expected him to be. His eyes were gray. He wore military fatigues made, I think, of silk.

  He had emerged from the visitors’ dugout at Havana’s Estadio Latinoamericano surrounded by security personnel, their shirttails laid over bulges on their belts. The crowd, 50,000 or more that summer day in 1987, cheered him wildly. The Cuban National Team had rushed to greet him when he’d waved from the stands behind home plate, but not us, Team USA. We’d looked over to Ron Fraser, our coach and the long-time, well-regarded coach at the University of Miami. He shook his head, as if to say, Nobody moves. He’d lived in Miami for three decades, had a lot of Cuban friends, and I assumed then he had his opinions about el Presidente.

  Castro disappeared under the stands and reached the field through the visitors’ clubhouse, the crowd roaring again when he stepped onto the field for the start of a seven-game exhibition series. We stared blankly, unsure of our obligations to our host. His aide asked that we line up so that Castro could greet us.

  For more than a week we’d had the impression we were being watched every moment, from our workouts to our afternoon strolls searching for edible sustenance after being served pork—with the skin and hair still on it—and fried cow brains. The suspicion was confirmed one afternoon at the Hotel Habana Libre. A handful of us were horsing around in our rooms when we spilled into the hallway, and in the commotion a baseball bounced through an open window. We were on the twelfth floor. Alarmed, and somewhat fearful of the consequences, we frantically dashed to our rooms, slammed the doors shut, and hoped that was the end of it. A knock on the door came only a few minutes later. A middle-aged man stood with his shoes on the threshold. He wore an oversized button-down shirt with pockets on the front and a sober expression, like most of the security men on the island. He was neither amused nor angry. He held the baseball. Without a word, he handed back the baseball, turned, and disappeared down the hall.

  Now Castro stood before us. He approached me with his translator just off his shoulder, extended his left hand and in Spanish complimented me on my play. He grinned and playfully—I assumed—cuffed my head with his right hand. At that moment I’d wished I knew more about Castro, about Cuba, about the revolution and all that had gone on here. In the cities and the countryside there had been billboards extolling communism and Castro, and promising great rewards for the people’s sacrifices, but I’d been taken more by their love for baseball. So, as I smiled and nodded at Castro I wondered if I should have been so gracious, and after what seemed a long time was relieved when he moved away from me and toward my teammates.

  Before Castro left he addressed us as a group, his translator filling in the pauses for our benefit. He said that while our countries did not share political ideology, the people did share a belief in culture and arts and, of course, baseball. He said that if there was anything we needed, we should ask “my people.” And he said he hoped we enjoyed the island and who “we are as people.” I thought he sounded genuine. And then he left.

  We all looked at one another, smiling slightly, retaking our bearings. Then we lost the first two games of the series.

  I was to start game three. A U.S. team hadn’t won on Cuban soil in a quarter century. The big stadium was packed and loud and the sun seemed to be burning holes into our caps. The local paper had announced that the one-handed pitcher would start that afternoon, and as I warmed up Cubans crowded to the railings, yelled my name, and pointed to my hand. Their voices were nearly lost in the shrill of horns and bongos and sirens from higher in the stands, but their passion for their game—and this game—would not be obscured.

  I’d never witnessed such a scene, much less pitched in one.

  Ron Fraser, pitching coach Jim Morris, and I had thought a lot about this game, about how to beat the mighty Cubans of Victor Mesa, Lourdes Gourriel, Omar Linares, Orestes Kindelan, and others. Every time we played, Linares, the third baseman, was the best player on the field. Their reputation was as perhaps the best fastball-hitting team in the world and yet they’d hammered breaking balls in the first two games of the series. I’d pitch off my fastball, try not to miss in, and hope that worked.

  The first batter in the first inning was Mesa, the most flamboyant of the Cubans on a roster that played with style. A center fielder with amazing skills, speed, and personality, Mesa was known as El Loco, or “The Orange Explosion,” and the people loved him. At the sight of him in the batter’s box, jumping around, twirling his bat, readying himself against this pitcher, the crowd stood and hollered and stomped its feet. The old stadium shook in anticipation.

  I threw a fastball near the middle of the plate. And Mesa bunted. Of course he did. The ball rolled near the third-base line as Mesa flew from the box. I dashed from the mound, barehanded the ball, turned and threw as hard as I could toward first.

  On a bang-bang play, Mesa was out.

  The place went nuts. The Cubans stood on their seats, threw their arms in the air, and cheered the play, the call, and the pluck of this pitcher they’d read about in the paper that morning. Mesa had thrown his helmet in disgust and was arguing with the first-base umpire.

  Despite the heat and a weak stomach brought about by unfamiliar food, I pitched deep into the game and we won. We’d played well and we’d won. For a couple dozen young ballplayers, most of us experiencing international baseball for the first time and the core of a team that would go on to play in the Pan American Games later that summer and the Olympics the following year, the victory was not insignificant. We’d stood in the heart of the Cuban capital against some of the best players we’d ever seen, we’d hung together, and we’d won. We’d win two more times in the series, too.

  The locals had taken to calling my name in broken English on the streets, and it was strange to be recognized so far from home. I’d had difficulty getting back to the hotel after pitching. The sidewalk outside our clubhouse and narrow street that led away from the old stadium were nearly impassable because of the people who’d massed there. They shouted and grabbed hold of my jersey, and the security guards pushed back, and eventually a small path cleared for Fraser and me to squeeze through. The bus then led a slow parade of Cubans through the streets toward the team hotel.

  Life and baseball, for all of us, had taken a dramatic turn.

  A FEW WEEKS earlier we’d walked into a large room with high ceilings and several rows of bunk beds, the bachelors officers’ quarters at Naval Air Station Memphis. The 3,800-acre base was actually in Millington, Tennessee, about forty miles north of Memphis, and a long way from Cape Cod, where I’d planned on pitching for the summer. For a Northern boy, the South’s sweetened tea, fried food, and slower pace were a charming diversion.

  The facilities there included a baseball diamond and room enough to board about forty of us invited by USA Baseball. Those of us who made it through the cuts would form the core of a team that would represent the country in the 1987 Pan American Games in Indianapolis, the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul, Korea, and, soon, before any of that, the seven-game exhibition series in Cuba.

  I’d just finished my sophomore season at Michigan. One of the benefits of s
taying in one place for a decent period of time—the east end of Flint, Central High, then Michigan—was the routine. New environments meant old questions, old awkwardness, old reminders. I knew everyone was watching. I knew their curiosity. Eventually, if I stayed around long enough, my disability would be forgotten, or at least become familiar enough to have lost its appeal as a conversation subject.

  But that would take time.

  Pretty soon I’d be Jim or Jimmy or Abby. But, first, I knew, I had to be the one-handed pitcher, play that for a while. They’d stick out their right hands and I’d grab on with my left, establish that. Then we’d go play ball, establish that. I’d laugh at the jokes, make a few myself, be one of the guys, establish that. Usually it was enough. But that doesn’t mean that it happened quickly enough for me.

  Tino Martinez was there from the University of Tampa; Ty Griffin from Georgia Tech; Dave Silvestri from the University of Missouri; Gregg Olson from Auburn; Mike Fiore from Miami; Pat Combs from Baylor; Ted Wood from the University of New Orleans; Scott Servais from Creighton; Ed Sprague from Stanford; Scott Livingstone from Texas A&M; Frank Thomas from Clemson; the one-handed guy from Michigan.

  That summer in southwest Tennessee was hot, presumably like all summers in southwest Tennessee. We were holed up on the Navy base, practicing twice a day, sleeping on bunks, and getting vanned into town for meals. We ate at a restaurant called Old Timers, over and over. The theme was railroads; a miniature train buzzed around on an overhead track in the main dining room. Old Millington was in black-and-white photos on the walls.