Imperfect: An Improbable Life

by Jim Abbott

  When the bus pulled away from the stadium, and we were still burning nervous energy, Ed Sprague stepped into the aisle and asked for everyone’s attention. We were in our uniforms still, caked with dirt and sweat and eye black. Duffel bags lined the aisle. Like all of us, Sprague wore his gold medal. He had been the team’s emotional glue since early the summer before. He also was the guy who instigated many of the late-night wars, early-morning pranks, and random acts of madness.

  “Coach Marquess,” he announced, “we have something to say to you.”

  Marquess turned, his stoic expression softening slightly after four months.

  Sprague grinned and continued: “Ted Wood threw the meat, Joe Slusarski broke the glass partition, and Mike Fiore threw all the balls in the moat.”

  The bus exploded in laughter. And Marquess, in spite of himself, joined in. He’d been waiting to exhale as much as we had been. Maybe more. We’d been a handful.

  Hours later, when night had fallen in Seoul, we’d taken the party outside the Olympic Village and to some of the finer establishments of the city. There would be no more games, no more practices, no more scouting reports. For months, in order to sample the local ales, we’d slipped away from the coaches. In taverns and cafés, amid the ruins of Rome and sculptures of Florence, from the joints of Charlotte and Jackson and Colorado Springs, we’d found time for boys to be boys. There, we’d release the tensions and fatigue of barnstorming baseball, and observe the rituals of the road, and mostly adhere to Coach Marquess’s rules. We figured we’d done a reasonable job having our fun and playing winning baseball. After all, for a couple dozen college kids tethered to a rigid schedule of travel-play-travel-play, this wasn’t supposed to be a death march. We’d grown together during some of those escapades, and they helped make us the young team that belonged on a field with the world’s best, and in ballparks where we were the enemy. Besides, what Marquess didn’t know, couldn’t possibly hurt him.

  So it was with some discomfort and plenty of amusement that on the team’s final evening together Charles Nagy and I found ourselves in a casino and at a blackjack table directly across from Coach Marquess. Through several hands we noted that—through blind luck, neither of us had played before—our good fortune apparently would extend beyond the events at Jamsil Stadium that afternoon. Marquess bore the look of contentment, having shepherded us across the world and delivered to USA Baseball a gold medal, with no major incidents beyond soaring mystery meat and an empty ball bag and a lot of near misses. Nagy and I couldn’t quite figure what to make of the grinning, tolerant man who shared our table, who for months had refused to break from his character as the gruff, buttoned-down leader.

  After we shared a few winning hands, a waitress appeared at the table. Marquess stopped her and deliberately ordered himself a Diet Coke. He glanced at us, then back to the waitress. A smile crossed his face and he raised two fingers. “Beers for them,” he said in English. The waitress nodded.

  Nagy and I looked at each other in disbelief, then back to Marquess, and the three of us laughed. This, apparently, was his thank-you for the hard work and dedication to the cause. And his way of saying, “I know what you suckers have been up to all summer.” When the beers arrived, we tipped them toward our coach, and he raised his glass of Diet Coke. What a long, strange, exhilarating, perfect summer it had been.

  The following morning we met in the lobby to board the bus to the airport for the long flight to Los Angeles. By then we each had at least a dozen bags, giveaway duffels from games and tournaments we’d played for months, filled with baseball gear and random junk accumulated at what seemed like a thousand stops.

  We’d spend those final twelve hours together dozing, recalling the games that had come and gone, regretting the gold medal defeat at the World Championships, but celebrating every inch of the victory in Seoul. Many of us had left on this odyssey as college juniors and seniors and were returning as the property of major-league franchises. As of August 3, when I signed, I was a California Angel, Benes was a San Diego Padre, Griffin a Chicago Cub, Ventura a Chicago White Sox, Martinez a Seattle Mariner, Nagy a Cleveland Indian, Sprague a Toronto Blue Jay, Ted Wood a San Francisco Giant, Jeff Branson a Cincinnati Red, Slusarski an Oakland A, Fiore a St. Louis Cardinal, Mickey Morandini a Philadelphia Phillie, and Silvestri and Scott Servais were Houston Astros.

  Most of us sensed we’d grown plenty as ballplayers, and maybe a little as men. We were sore and tired, glad to be going home, slightly nervous about our reentry into the real world, and curious about the coming experiences of pro ball. In some cases, bonus checks would be waiting at home, the first real money we’d make outside of our hometown supermarkets or restaurants or construction sites or farms. So we announced what cars we’d buy or vacations we’d take. And we argued over the best stereo systems, fishing boats, and hunting rifles.

  In Los Angeles, we assembled for one final meal, a groggy twenty or thirty minutes spent over breakfast. Then someone would check his watch, stand and gather his bags, and disappear down the LAX concourse. One by one, we waved and smiled and found our flights home, until Team USA had scattered again across the country.

  “All right,” Sprague had said, “I’ll see you … whenever.”

  And he, too, was gone, along with Fiore. They were headed to Instructional League in Florida, where they’d stay with Tino Martinez’s grandmother in Clearwater.

  On the flight to Detroit, I was taken by the quiet. I sat alone for the first time in months. Spring training waited on the other side of winter. I figured I’d spend some time in Ann Arbor, buy that black Jeep Grand Cherokee I had to have, maybe squeeze a few more weeks out of college. The lifestyle, if not the classrooms. Maybe I’d help my dad on his route, stock some shelves, spend a little time with him, Mom, and Chad. Heck, how did an Olympic gold medalist kill time? I laughed. I’d made some of the best friends I ever would make. I’d seen the world, some of it from a pitcher’s mound, most of it alongside a bunch of guys just like me.

  Just like me, I mused.

  Mom and Dad were at the gate. I told them I was tired but okay, that it was great to see them and great to be home. We gathered my bags and went outside, where a long black limousine took up most of the curb. Police cars idled nearby. I eyed them, fighting the urge to explain I had nothing to do with the meat-throwing or glass-exploding incidents.

  The limo was for me. For us. So were the police, who, their cars lit up, would clear our way to Flint.

  Dusk was falling as we passed through Detroit and into its northwestern suburbs. Twenty-one years before, Mom and Dad had taken a similar route, in the other direction, him driving a borrowed Impala and her in full labor in the backseat.

  Past the exit for Aunt Katie’s and the hospital, along a highway whose neighborhoods were failing just like Flint’s, Dad finally had the police escort he’d hoped for more than two decades ago. Except now we weren’t in any real hurry.

  The limousine drove to downtown Flint, to an outdoor pavilion, which was lit up on what had become a perfect and warm fall night. Wearing a blue Olympic jacket and Olympic sweats and with the gold medal still hanging from my neck, I swung open the rear door of the long car and friends, family, and local officials cheered. The mayor, Matt Collier, had arranged most of the homecoming celebration. He looked barely older than me. And now this was his town and these were his people, and I was one of them again.

  Since leaving for Ann Arbor after high school, and then spending so much of the summers traveling, I hadn’t seen much of Flint. There were times I felt sad for what had once been a robust city, then one suffocated by a blizzard of pink slips, many provided by GM. The young mayor had come to Flint’s aid, as a public servant and when Michael Moore’s documentary Roger & Me threatened to strip Flint of its dignity. Barely more than a year after I’d returned, he’d tell Time magazine, “Anyone who knows Flint can’t help realizing the film is fiction. If this is a documentary, I wonder about all those PBS shows on whales and dolph
ins.” He was still in there fighting for Flint, which I admired.

  Back at home and greeted by hundreds of people, I was surprised by the enthusiasm. All those time zones away, it was hard to know if the Olympics had resonated here. While I wasn’t much for being the center of attention, the sentiment was touching. It was good to be home. These were the people who had treated me so well when I was growing up, the teachers and Little League coaches and neighbors and friends who’d cut through my insecurities. They’d believed in me when I wasn’t sure there was all that much to believe in.

  They were proud of me. And I was proud of that. So, while a few folks stood up and said some nice things about me and our team, and as I fidgeted uncomfortably because they’d gone through so much trouble for all this, I was pleased they were pleased, that I’d honored their belief in me by going out and doing something worthwhile. A lot of really good athletes had come from their schools, from these streets and playgrounds, many of whom I’d looked up to as a boy. I didn’t know how I could ever live up to those men and women, but this seemed a start.

  Looking out at the familiar faces, seeing how happy they were for me and for the city—and it was true we both had our flaws—I was soothed by familiar warmth. It had come when I’d earned my way into the pickup games at Burroughs Park. And on the first days of Little League, when Mark Conover’s dad gave me third base and a place in the batting order. And when Bob Holec had chosen me for the varsity, the day I became One-Point-Five. And when I stood in the old locker room at Atwood Stadium, pounding the shoulder pads of my fellow Central Indians, and then going out and winning a football game.

  I belonged.

  Bleary-eyed, thrilled to be home, and overwhelmed by the reception, I remember the following weeks as a bit of a daze. We’d retired after the downtown reception to our house, where I rehashed for my parents, Chad, and friends, the stories of the summer, the epic games against Cuba, and the Olympic experience. I’d turned twenty-one a month before, so I shared a beer with Dad. We gorged ourselves on Angelo’s Coney dogs well after fatigue had set in, and we talked and laughed some more, sitting around the same table where Dad had left his note to me. “Proud of you son,” he’d written, and I felt it again.

  A couple days later, rested and settled, I walked into a Flint car dealership and bought that black Jeep Grand Cherokee. It came with black leather, gold rims, and some misgivings; Jeeps weren’t made in Flint, as people undoubtedly would note, in a place where that still mattered. I paid twenty grand in cash, straight out of my signing bonus, didn’t even haggle. That car meant freedom.

  (It also would come to mean trouble. The car was stolen a couple months later and, when returned, had been all but totaled. Six months after that, a friend borrowed the car and proceeded to drive it into a deer, which nearly totaled it again. On the bright side, I once picked up a lovely young lady in that car for a first date, managed not to run into anything, and she became my wife. I’m thinking it was the gold rims.)

  For the next few months, and for the first time I could recall, I belonged to no one. I stood on no lines. I was on no schedule. There was no baseball to be played. I existed somewhere between the afterglow of the Olympics and the promise of pro ball. I spent some time in Ann Arbor, but wasn’t a student anymore, which I found really wasn’t a bad way to do college.

  Finally, I returned to Flint to bide my time until spring training, and prepared for another summer of bus trips and buffet food, all the minor leagues had to offer. As spring drew near, excited as I was, I began to wonder what the next step would bring.

  I wondered if I could belong there, too.

  CHAPTER 12

  Up there in those rows of blue seats, among those 27,000 faces, those hopes and expectations, Dana sat behind home plate, twenty rows up, to the first-base side. I’d left her on the Upper East Side hours ago, and she’d made her way to the ballpark by game time, which she always did when I pitched.

  I never looked up, never found her, but always sensed when she was there, and was grateful for it. I knew she wanted desperately for me to win, which, of course, made two of us. On television, Tony Kubek introduced the sixth inning by saying, “The Indians do not yet have a base hit,” but that hadn’t really crossed my mind, or Dana’s. I was looking at the other “0,” the one in the “runs” category, and the growing stack of water cups.

  Three months earlier, on another Saturday afternoon—that one sunny and warm—in the Bronx, I’d taken a no-hitter into the eighth inning against the Chicago White Sox. I was sitting where I was now and Dana was where she was that day, when Bo Jackson came up with an out in the eighth, me five outs from the unthinkable. I’d made a good pitch and Bo flared a single to center. Then I’d made another good pitch and Ron Karkovice homered down the left-field line, and so we both remained sore enough from that emotional whiplash to be quite and totally satisfied with victory.

  Now ahead 4–0—Velarde had homered to lead off the bottom of the fifth—I was thinking “win,” and Dana was, too, and the Indians probably were wondering where that guy from six days ago had gone.

  Jim Thome led off the sixth inning. He had this very flat swing that stayed in the strike zone for a very long time, which meant I couldn’t have my curveball or cutter stay on the same plane for very long. I needed to pitch downhill, a term my pitching coach with the Angels, Marcel Lachemann, so often used, so that the ball arrived in the vicinity of Thome’s bat on an angle. Though he’d not been in the league long, I recalled he’d hit some balls hard to left—his opposite field—against me before. Sure enough, on a two-ball, one-strike pitch, he lined a curveball to shortstop that Velarde gloved near his right shin. I’d take the out, even a loud one.

  Then, before I’d run into the top of the Indians’ order, I walked Junior Ortiz. Ortiz, you might recall, was the Indians’ number nine hitter, and he arrived batting .239. I not only walked him, by the way, but walked him on four pitches, causing me to scream something very loud into my glove that, even from a couple hundred feet away, might have made Bronx denizens blush.

  Kenny Lofton came up, took a strike, fouled off the next two pitches, then took a fastball up. Now, by the time I was done, only two hitters would have as many or more plate appearances against me than Lofton and hit for a better average against me than Lofton. Mike Devereaux batted .441 in forty-four plate appearances and Edgar Martinez batted .422 in forty-nine plate appearances. Lofton in thirty-nine hit .412, which is why I was so disappointed when one of my best curveballs of the game started at his right shoulder, dropped down and through the strike zone, and went unrecognized by plate umpire Ted Hendry. And why I was so pleased when the next pitch, a curveball away, was hit on a fly to left and caught easily by Dion James.

  That over with, Felix Fermin hit the first pitch, an inside cutter, to Boggs at third. A routine play. Like that, I was six innings in. I was a comfortable eighty-four pitches along. I was winning. Dana, brought to the front edge of her seat by the walk and my unhappiness with it, eased against the backrest.

  Up in the broadcast booth, Kubek sent the viewers into commercial break.

  “The Indians,” he said calmly, “are still hitless.”

  CHAPTER 13

  The Angels were a snakebitten franchise. Since their inception in 1961, their seasons either had ended glumly or—on three occasions, just to mix it up—in paralyzing despair. In the eighties, they’d won two American League West titles. In the championship series that followed they played six games that, had they won any of them, would have sent them to their first World Series and signaled the arrival of Gene Autry’s beloved franchise. They lost all six.

  Their history showed they’d averaged a new manager every couple years, allowed Nolan Ryan to leave in free agency, spent millions on other free agents, and generally found ways to lose by a lot or lose by a little or lose in the most heart-wrenching way ever.

  As if that weren’t enough, they played their games an hour’s drive from Dodger Stadium, and the shadow of
the Dodgers was cast at least to Anaheim. The Dodgers had had only two managers—Walter Alston and Tommy Lasorda—since 1954. Their owner—Peter O’Malley—was a baseball blueblood. They were L.A.’s team, Hollywood’s team, occasionally America’s team. And while they arrived in Southern California only three years before the Angels had, the Dodgers oozed stability and composure. They’d won two World Series in the eighties, including in 1988, a season in which the Angels lost eighty-seven games, finished twenty-nine games out of first place in the AL West, and fired a manager.

  Because of Autry, however, the Angels had a lovable quality. They were often underdogs, but they were dashing underdogs on a horse named Champion, humming “Back in the Saddle Again,” and wearing a big cowboy hat. Everyone loved Mr. Autry.

  What I knew about the Angels beyond that was limited. Lance Parrish, their new catcher, was one of my favorite players growing up, because of his Tigers lineage. (One of my enduring memories of baseball was Parrish’s mitt, ringed in orange, guiding a young Jack Morris, or a younger Dan Petry.) Wally Joyner, the first baseman, was nearly Rookie of the Year three years before. The starting rotation was old-ish at the top (Bert Blyleven) and young-ish at the bottom (Chuck Finley), and the bullpen featured a similar blend of old (Bob McClure and Greg Minton) and young (Bryan Harvey, Willie Fraser).

  Of course, little of the major-league team’s makeup would matter to me beyond spring training. At some point in March, I’d slide over to the minor-league side and begin preparations for a season in the sticks. I figured it would be like my summers with Team USA, only longer and probably hotter. Maybe the buses would be nicer. There’d be no medal waiting at the end.