Imperfect: An Improbable Life

by Jim Abbott

  I’d been so excited. Against its reputation as a late arriver, the Anaheim crowd had been thick and loud before the first pitch. Cameras had flashed everywhere.

  I made it, I’d thought. Four years before, I’d been a senior at Central, all elbows and knees and spotty mechanics. Now I was on a big-league mound, in a ballpark so big and crowded I couldn’t find my parents, grandparents, Chad, anyone who’d come see me pitch, for all the others who’d come see me pitch. By the time I’d meet with them postgame, I’d already discovered that playing in the majors was beyond satisfying, but that losing in the majors was a dark and very humbling experience. So Mom and Dad smiled and I smiled and none of us really believed in the others’ smiles. I was mad I wasn’t better.

  The experience changed me, or at least changed what baseball was for me, except I had no idea at the time. I’d walked in naive enough to believe that the pages of the script would keep turning and the story would remain happy. Fourteen outs later, I’d walked out carrying not just a glove and some regrets, but an urgency to succeed like I’d never felt before. Because I wanted to stay. I’d lost before, sometimes bitterly, but the taste was more pungent here.

  Strangely, in a game I’d played for what seemed forever, everything had felt off. My emotions had been out of balance. I was overwhelmed by the day, by what it meant, by the expectations of the people who came to see the new kid, so at times it seemed I was outside of my body, watching like everyone else. Worse, hoping like everyone else.

  The game moved too fast for my brain to translate, a blur from the other side of a train window, and nothing I did would slow it down. I knew I was heaving the ball with no touch and no plan, what we called “gorilla pitching,” muscling the ball to the glove. I’d pitched big games in big moments, and this felt like those, up until I got up on the mound and tried to get an out. Then, I was inexplicably in a game that was beyond my ability. My focus was shot, my thoughts and strategies spun out of control, and I spent the better part of ninety minutes begging for the ball to find the strike zone, then hoping batted balls would at least aim themselves at somebody.

  During spring training, I’d been amazed at how indifferent players were to the games’ outcomes. When I mentioned it to my roommate, the bullpen catcher Rick Turner, he’d been amazed at my amazement.

  “They’re just getting their work in, Jim,” he had said, and I wondered just how different the games would be come April. So far, they were very different, mostly because I’d been a wreck.

  From the days of camp, when my cutter was boring in on the winter-rusted bats of the Cansecos and McGwires, suddenly I’d felt like a one-pitch pitcher, maybe two. My slow curve was mediocre. Same with the changeup. The slider was okay, but for one night it looked an awful lot like my cutter.

  As I sat in that press conference, sounding resilient, eager for the ball again, what I was really thinking was, “Man, I gotta lot to learn.” I had to get back out there.

  It was a while before the swirl slowed long enough for me to process the details, in part because the attention made more of my starts than I would have liked. After two of them, my record was 0-2. The offense hadn’t scored a single run. The defense had committed four errors. My earned-run average was greater than 4. My third start, which would have been at Chicago’s old Comiskey Park, was snowed out. Lach told me I wouldn’t be bumped to the next night, but skipped entirely. I wouldn’t pitch for another six days. With a friend in town, I needed to take a breath, and went for a beer on Division Street, in an old-school, peanut-shells-on-the-floor joint called The Lodge, and stayed for more.

  Some lessons come cheap. This wasn’t one of those.

  Chicago is a late town and I shut it down. When I opened my eyes again in the hotel room, the clock said it was coming up on four.

  P.M.

  I looked again, squinting at the tiny red letters.

  P.M.

  My head hurt. My stomach rolled. My hands shook. And the last team bus to the ballpark would leave in eight minutes.

  Alert enough to recall we’d be flying out after the game, and as gently as I could while still hurrying, I threw anything that looked familiar into my suitcase, pulled a pink shirt over my head, covered myself in a multicolored sport coat that, admittedly, looked more like a horse blanket, and stumbled toward the lobby. Outside, where a cold rain fell, there was only traffic where a bus should have been.

  Two weeks into my big-league career, having been handed the greatest responsibility of my life, I stood on the curb on Michigan Avenue hungover, matted by rain, and hoping not to throw up. There wasn’t a cab in sight.

  “Mr. Abbott?”

  A voice from somewhere.

  “Could I have your autograph?”

  Trying to hold it together, I signed.

  “I think you missed your bus.”

  It was a boy, maybe thirteen.

  “My mom’s here. Want a ride?”

  I nodded, gently as I could.

  A Jaguar pulled to the curb. The boy helped me with my suitcase and he climbed into the backseat with it. I gutted through a smile of thanks to his mother and we started toward the South Side.

  My sweat smelled like beer and cigars. Had I smoked a cigar? I don’t even like cigars. The windows fogged, I assumed because of all the sweating. The heat from the defroster was making me sweat more, and the more I sweated, the more the windows fogged, and the higher the kid’s mom turned the defroster. If the cycle continued, I thought I might pass out.

  A mile from the ballpark, I spoke.

  “Ma’am,” I said thinly, “would you mind pulling over?”

  I opened the door, leaned into the gutter, threw up, drew myself back into the car, pulled the door shut, and wiped my mouth with the sleeve of my horse blanket.

  The boy’s mom said, “Are you sick or did you have too much of the Chicago pop?”

  The Chicago pop. I’d never heard that.

  “Pop,” I gurgled.

  She sighed. I sighed.

  At the players’ entrance to Comiskey, I thanked the boy and his mom for the rescue, muttered something about being sorry for the vomit thing, hoisted my bag from the backseat, and headed for the slaughter. I was late. I was sick. I smelled like the men’s room floor at The Lodge. And I was thoroughly humiliated.

  My teammates were spread in a circle on the floor of the clubhouse, stretching. Through the quiet, I stepped over a leg or two, dropped my bag at the locker, and gently crawled into my uniform. I considered joining everyone on the floor, but instead made for the bathroom, weakly explaining it must have been a bad cigar or something. From the clubhouse, a man lying on the carpet—stretching, say—could see straight into the bathroom, under the stalls, clear to the other side. What all my new teammates saw were my toes, facing the toilet, curling in anguish.

  I retired to a table in the trainer’s room. When I opened my eyes, Rader was standing over me.

  “Cigar,” I said.

  I couldn’t fool a mom driving a Jag. I had no chance with Rader.

  “Son”—uh-oh—“you don’t have to do that with me. I know Rush Street. And I know The Lodge. A cigar. Uh-huh.”

  That went well.

  On his way out, Rader brushed past Blyleven. I was about to tell Bert it was nice of him to come check on me but I’d be all right, when he lit up a cigar and blew a plume of smoke into my face.

  I ran to the bathroom. I felt awful, but at least I was running again.

  On the bench that night during a game I could hardly see, Dan Petry sat beside me. I just wanted to take it all back and I wanted to feel like myself again and, mostly, I wanted to stop throwing up.

  Petry shook his head.

  “We don’t do that,” he said. “This isn’t college. Act like a pro.”

  I grimaced. What a bitter lesson it was. What a fool I’d been. From then on, I’d generally stick to dinners with the other pitchers. Blyleven would take me out and pay every time. When we dined as a group, the bill would be decided by
credit card roulette. My card—it was red, and I figured it must have given off heat—was blindly chosen by the waitress from a breadbasket every time. Affectionately, that card became known as Big Red.

  Yeah, there was a lot to take in. And sometimes, I even pitched.

  By my third start, the attendance at Anaheim Stadium was about half of what it was for my debut. I pitched a decent six innings and beat the Baltimore Orioles. The game had quieted in my head some. The baseball began to feel more familiar, the strategies clearer, and I was able to disappear—a little—into a clubhouse where I badly wanted to be one of the guys. It was April 24. Frank Robinson, the Hall of Famer, was the Orioles’ manager. Cal Ripken was the shortstop. I’d given up a couple runs early and was behind, 2–1, when in the fifth inning Parrish homered and Johnny Ray drove in Claudell Washington with a grounder. I pitched a scoreless sixth inning, Minton got five outs and Harvey got four.

  Afterward, I went into the trainers’ room and asked if I could use the phone. It was late in Anaheim, two hours later in Michigan, but I knew my dad would be awake. I pulled the door closed behind me as the phone rang on Maxine Street in Flint.

  Dad picked up. I could tell he knew it would be me.

  “I won,” I told him. “I won.”

  “Jim,” he said, “I’m so happy for you, so proud of you.”

  He hung up the phone and told Mom, “If it all ends tomorrow, he can say, ‘I won a major-league game.’ How about that? Another threshold. He sounded good.”

  I won some and lost some, shut out the Boston Red Sox in the middle of May, and two weeks later beat the Milwaukee Brewers on a night where I pitched seven innings and McClure got the save. We were in first place that night, I’d won five games so far, and McCaskill had a couple of us to his hotel room to burn off some energy. McClure was there. Amid the laughs, he became serious.

  He looked at me and asked how much longer I intended to go on like this, surviving on a pitch or two. I thought I knew where he was headed. He’d counseled me before about the changeup and the curveball, about the difference between surviving and winning, about hitters who’d figure me out. And about staying. Didn’t I want to stay?

  “You’re not as good as you should be,” he said in a room that had gone quiet but for his voice. “You’re not living up to your ability.”

  I looked at him without expression. Nobody had said that to me before.

  As much as I hated what it implied, perhaps I’d come to agree when people wrote and said I’d long ago outdistanced my natural abilities. They’d meant I’d done a lot for a guy without a hand. McClure looked through that, maybe in ways I couldn’t.

  I was shaken by his honesty. It occurred to me I’d survived that night’s game but might not get out of this hotel room.

  We’d had conversations before about pitching. He’d urged more off-speed pitches then. We’d be in the back of a bus and we’d get to talking about the art of pitching. With his rebel spirit and tough-love challenges, he reminded me in some ways of my father. Mac, like Dad, was going to send me back out to the playground.

  “Quit fighting it,” he’d say. “Learn to throw that pitch. Someday you’re going to throw a changeup and you’re going to get it. You have the power fastball. But there’s other ways.”

  Invariably, I’d ask, “When do you know when to take something off a pitch?”

  He’d say, “I don’t know. You just know.”

  “What?” I’d say. “I don’t get that.”

  “There’s no answer, Jim. No right answer.”

  So I’d get off the bus thinking about the answer to the unanswerable question, to the question that wouldn’t be asked, or whatever it was Mac had said.

  Idling away a night in Milwaukee, we’d left the arena of pitch selection and entered into something deeply personal. I worked hard. I wanted to win so badly. I was winning, mostly. Wasn’t I doing all I could? Wasn’t I?

  “Learn how to pitch,” McClure said.

  Like that, he’d changed my view of how others might perceive me. I’d so wanted to be seen and judged purely by the way I pitched, and by the results of my pitching. McClure, without having been asked, complied. And it made me … uncomfortable.

  Could I endure that examination? What was I without the backstory? Was I the man who, in victory, welcomed the appraisals, but believed them harsh in defeat? How honest did I expect people to be?

  I hardly slept that night and didn’t do much better the night after.

  McClure was relentless, and I worked with Lach on developing a pitch that wasn’t hard and a plan when to throw it, and some days it came and others it didn’t. Mostly, I threw the cutter and the slider, became more proficient at throwing to the left and right sides of the plate, and pushed through toward the end of the season. We endured two late losing streaks, spent one final day in late August in first place, and finished in third, eight games behind the Oakland A’s.

  My record was 12-12, which was about what I deserved. The team, I thought, deserved better, but there was no questioning our fight. In fact, it had become a trademark of ours.

  We were in Chicago, falling out of contention, when we found ourselves in another shoving match with the White Sox, not quite as heartfelt as the one on Opening Day, but still potentially damaging. It only takes one guy to change the emotional dynamic of fifty men on an infield, and on this day he found Rader. As the teams were separating peacefully, a man from over our dugout screamed, “What the fuck are you gonna do with one hand, Abbott?” I, of course, had heard that kind of thing before. In moments like that I almost expected it.

  Rader didn’t.

  He tore after the heckler, three Angels holding him back, the fan retreating up the steps to the concourse. Rader shouted after him, “Bad things are going to happen to you! Bad things! You’ll burn in hell!”

  I loved Rader.

  He was, however, up against a fight I had too much experience with, and one that would never go away. Just two months after Opening Day, I’d hit the Brewers’ second baseman, Gus Polidor, with a pitch during a game in Milwaukee. Polidor, a slight Venezuelan, took exception and raced toward the mound shouting angrily in Spanish. I had no idea what he was saying, but as he was pointing aggressively toward his own right hand, I guessed it was something about mine. He pulled up short of the mound, turned toward our dugout, and got into it with Rader, who’d started toward the mound himself. It ended peacefully, fortunately for Polidor.

  But for all of that, my rookie year was not entirely about pitching mechanics, bench-clearing melees, Jaguar rides, and various big-league sniff tests. In fact, some of that season wasn’t really about baseball at all.

  I HAD AN idea—an inaccurate one, it turned out—that reaching the major leagues would be a personal finish line. I was never going to have two hands, but I assumed the story would grow old, and some other sparkly object would come along to catch the eye of the sports world and, anyway, by then I would have proven the game was not so different for me. I’d just be a guy on a roster, trying to be special, but owed nothing of the sort.

  I was wrong. The attention from the media was, at times, stifling. The labels remained. The headlines in the local papers in every city we played were unchanged. I was, first, the one-handed pitcher. Away from my teammates, I’d tell my story over and over, because people wanted me to and because I wanted the organization to be proud of its choice to believe in me. And because I had the hardest time saying no, even when I would have preferred to be a kid learning to pitch in the big leagues and nothing more.

  And even that wasn’t what I was so completely wrong about.

  I was wrong about the children. I didn’t see them coming, not in the numbers they did. I didn’t expect the stories they told, or the distance they traveled to tell them, or the desperation revealed in them.

  They were shy and beautiful, and they were loud and funny, and they were, like me, somehow imperfectly built. And, like me, they had parents nearby, parents who willed themselve
s to believe that this accident of circumstance or nature was not a life sentence, and that the spirits inside these tiny bodies were greater than the sums of their hands and feet.

  The letters and phone calls began in spring training. First, there were a couple letters at a time, and Tim Mead would bring them by my locker, and we’d write back something supportive and personal. Soon, there were requests to come to camp for a meeting, and we’d schedule fifteen minutes in a day. By the time we got to Anaheim, a couple letters had become dozens, and during the season became hundreds. I read every letter, and Tim and I answered every one, because I knew these kids and I knew how far a little boy or girl could run with fifty words of reassurance.

  The letters became lines of families at the doorways of clubhouses from Fenway Park to Yankee Stadium to Comiskey Park to the Kingdome, and tiny, quiet tears in dugouts from Arlington Stadium to Kauffman Stadium to SkyDome to Anaheim Stadium.

  Some we knew were coming. Others just showed up. And Tim would catch my eye, point his thumb toward the door, and I’d excuse myself from the card game. At times, I was conflicted. I did not want to leave the clubhouse or teammates I was just then getting to know. Every time I stood up—“Back in fifteen minutes”—I was announcing again my difference, confirming how I was viewed, not that there was any missing it. Every photo that ran with magazine and newspaper articles featured my right hand. That is, when I wasn’t covering it with my left hand. The Life magazine photographer Neil Leifer followed me for three days, and the result was a lot of pictures of my right arm.

  Apparently, that was who I was to them, to most everyone, including the children.

  And yet, I could hardly decline.

  When I was a boy, a ballplayer from Flint—Ron Pruitt—had made it to the big leagues. Dad knew him a little. So when he came to Detroit with the Cleveland Indians, Dad took me to Tiger Stadium and Pruitt shook my hand and gave me a ball, and the experience meant the world. Years later, Rick Leach, a Michigan guy and Detroit Tiger, helped recruit me to Ann Arbor, and I could barely hear what he was saying over the screaming in my head, That’s Rick Leach!