Imperfect: An Improbable Life

by Jim Abbott

  I knew what it meant to brush up against a major leaguer. I had no idea what it might have meant to meet a major leaguer who looked like me.

  So I found my glove and followed Tim through a tunnel and into the dugout, where another family was waiting with another story. And then I’d be moved by both. The parents would be kind and appreciative, and their little boy would stare out with wide, yearning eyes, and he would be missing an arm, so that one sleeve of his baseball jersey would flop all over, and it wouldn’t seem to bother him at all.

  “Hey,” I’d say, “you play baseball?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Show me how you do your glove.”

  And the little boy would hoist this massive glove head high, waiting for an imaginary throw, determination spread across his face.

  “What position do you play?”

  “Pitcher, like you.”

  “Aw, don’t be a pitcher,” I’d say. “Be a shortstop. They get to play every day. All right, now show me how you hold the bat.”

  The parents, standing nearby, would laugh along. I know they wanted to know, exactly, “How?” How had I made it work? How could they? How would their little boy grow up to be whatever he wanted to be? How would he endure?

  I would tell them about my parents. They’d made me feel special for what I was, and yet treated me like I was every other kid from the neighborhood. I would tell them about my frustrations, and their words, “This is something to be lived up to.” I asked them to see that that, and so much else, were possible, and amazing things could happen. My parents had done that for me, and they could do the same for their boy.

  The connections lasted five minutes, maybe ten. I felt better leaving every single one. I hoped they did, too.

  A little boy named Adam came to see me at Comiskey Park. He stood with his mom and dad outside the clubhouse before batting practice. Tim opened the door and Adam, who was five, stepped back against his mom’s legs, across the concourse. He was missing a hand.

  His mom leaned into his ear. “There he is,” she said. “You can go talk to him.”

  Adam looked again to his mom, gathered his courage and ran to me, wrapping his arms around me when he arrived.

  As the meetings accumulated, and as I was touched by every single little boy and girl—when some literally would reach out to confirm that my defect was as real as theirs—the experiences shifted my perspective from me and my condition to a broader recognition of all of these other people and their conditions. I hadn’t known, hadn’t even considered really, how many people were like me.

  I’d lived their young lives already. Now they were waiting on kindness. They were waiting on the one thing that came along that they loved so much, they would never put it down. Baseball was powerful like that. The game drew me to it, and now it drew them to me. In a few quiet minutes orchestrated by Tim and the elements of right time and right place, this child and I would stand inside the cathedrals of baseball, passed by clattering spikes on cement, and convince each other that anything was possible, still.

  The meetings weren’t always so formal, and then they’d be a voice from behind the dugout, or from the hotel lobby, or from a sidewalk half a block back.

  Along the rail in foul territory, before a game, I’d inch toward the dugout, signing as I went. A ball here, a baseball card there, a cap or a glove. And then there would be a little boy, not asking for anything, just standing with his arms out, one hand absent.

  See? his eyes pleaded. I’m like you.

  “Hey, pal, how you doing? Play ball? Good for you.”

  Or a little girl, shyly gripping a ball, too shy to actually push it out over the rail. In the moment of eye contact, I could always tell she was special.

  “Show him your hand, honey,” her mom would say. She wanted me to see.

  And the little girl would draw her arm from her coat pocket, showing no hand at all. I knew what she felt. I had kept my hand in my coat pocket, too.

  It was powerful. These were the people who’d come to the ballpark early, fought through the professional autograph hounds, worked their way to the rail, and hoped.

  Stop, their eyes said. Don’t go.

  I never felt like I did enough. The letters I wrote, the ten minutes I spent before batting practice, the hours over a course of a series, it wasn’t enough. I couldn’t convey what I wanted to share, the belief that so much is possible. Not for what I’d done, but for what they would do. For what they could do, if they believed, too.

  Some came with their own tales of achievement. They were playing baseball. They were playing hockey. They were getting straight A’s, or learning to drive, or in the band, and they came to tell me their stories. They wanted me to know they were doing great, too, that they were hopeful and upbeat and unsinkable, too.

  There was a boy, maybe fourteen. His arm was to be amputated. I didn’t know why. He wanted to come see me pitch, but when he was healthy enough to go to the ballpark, I wasn’t healthy enough to pitch. I was on the disabled list. We just missed each other. I’d met him. He was a good kid, and scared.

  Tim Mead called on a Saturday morning. The boy had suffered a stroke. I drove to Anaheim and together we went to the hospital. We entered the room and the boy, upset that I was there, ashamed I would see him hurt and vulnerable, began to cry. His mother began to cry. I couldn’t help but cry.

  I sat on the bed and we talked about courage, and about getting better, and about believing in himself.

  We left him in that room. Then, in silence, we drove back to Anaheim.

  Tim left me at my car, climbed the stairs to his office, and pulled the door closed. Then he began to cry.

  There were so many out there like that boy.

  I was inspired. They pushed me back onto the field and into my own battles. I was going to be just like them.

  CHAPTER 14

  The zero, the one everyone was staring at, had been on that old scoreboard for so long it was getting hard to ignore. The yellowed lights, while burning a perfect and comforting rectangle into a gloomy Saturday afternoon, by the moment grew more electrifying and more difficult to live up to.

  As I returned to the mound for the seventh inning, thinking about a first-pitch strike to Carlos Baerga and surviving the middle of the Indians’ lineup another time, it hung somewhere over my right shoulder, glowing expectantly.

  Zero hits.

  Had there been a chance I didn’t know, I could have read it in the ballpark. There was something new in the crowd’s tone, like a living thing. Day games started slow, the august place sleeping off the night before. Teammates who might have mentioned a pitch here or there, grunted something about a good or crummy play, commented on another score in another town, began to keep those observations to themselves.

  Three innings is still a very long time, plenty long enough for something to go wrong. If it was perspective I sought, I’d need to go back only those six days, when the Indians required three innings to score seven runs and send me stomping into the Cleveland night.

  I’d thrown eighty-four pitches through six innings, which wasn’t too many. I could get to 120 or so without too much trouble. And I began to feel a push. I didn’t feel alone at all. In fact, I couldn’t help but begin to enjoy what was happening. Not the result—which again, who knows?—but the process. These nine guys—ten with the DH—trying to do this ridiculously difficult thing. For nine more outs I’d let go of the ball, then stand back and watch it all unfold.

  Carlos Baerga, still batting left-handed, led off the seventh inning. Nokes set up away for a cutter, but not just away: beyond-the-head-of-Baerga’s-bat away. The pitch was down and, indeed, away. Baerga, aggressive as usual, went after it and got just the top of the ball, which bounced once in front of the plate and again about halfway to first base. I busted a few steps toward the bag, and slowed when Don Mattingly gloved the chopper and waved me away. My momentum carried me at a jog toward the bag and, after recording the out, Mattingly poked me in the gut w
ith his mitt before turning and firing the ball to Randy Velarde.

  About then it occurred to me, He knew. They all knew. And they were beginning to think about it, too, counting down the outs, feeling the crowd, glancing now and again at the scoreboard, confirming that zero still hanging there. Mattingly’s gesture was his way of encouraging me, his way of saying We’re all here for you, trust us and keep it going.

  Two pitches later it was clear how right he was. After fouling off a cutter, Albert Belle pulled a grounder crisply and dangerously wide of third base. Nokes had asked for something down and in and I’d left it up half a foot, and I’d watched the grounder zip past me toward the hole. Velarde went deep to his backhand side, along the cut of the outfield grass. If the ball got to him, he’d have no chance to throw out Belle.

  Wade Boggs, in his first season with the Yankees after all those seasons in Boston, had at that point not won a Gold Glove, but there were two in his future, and when he got them I’d think of what happened next. Boggs took a couple jabby steps and lunged to his left, half-smothering and half-spearing that three-hopper just as it nearly skidded past him. In a cloud of dust, he leaped to his feet and made a hard throw to Mattingly, just as Belle crossed the bag. First-base umpire Jim Evans raised his fist, the crowd roared, and I turned and nodded at Boggs.

  From that play, acknowledgment came from the stands. The quiet etiquette of the ballpark had evaporated in those four seconds—from the crackle of bat on ball, to the snap of ball in glove, to the silence as the ball raced Belle across the diamond, to the cascade of approval from Yankees fans—we were all connected. It was on.

  It’s one thing to be pitching a no-hitter in the seventh inning. It’s another to believe that maybe it could happen. At that moment, with the way the fans were cheering, the way the guys were playing behind me, the way the Indians’ hitters kept finding gloves, I began to believe there might be something special out there. I mean, I couldn’t utter the words, of course. I could still hardly fathom them. But that was a hell of a play Boggs had made, and I wasn’t the only one feeling it, and with one more pitch—Randy Milligan hit a soft chopper to Boggs at third, a routine play if somewhat close at first base—I was through the three-four-five hitters and into the eighth inning, six outs left.

  As I approached the first-base line, I picked up my head and spotted Jimmy Key, a really good, smart pitcher I’d become friends with, and Scott Kamieniecki, another former University of Michigan pitcher I liked a lot. They were on the bench and, as usual, having a pretty good time. Bursting with excitement and anticipation, I smiled at them and—before those 27,000-plus and the television cameras and anyone else who might be looking in—broke into my imitation of Kamieniecki’s typically exaggerated jog from the mound. It was heavy-legged and loose-armed, and bent slightly at the waist and, of course, more than a little goofy. And I just felt like doing it, like I needed to let out a laugh and so did everybody else.

  As I descended the stairs into the dugout, Nokes rapped me on the butt with his mask. Key laughed and gave me a high five, not because I was pitching so great, but because I’d dogged Kamieniecki. As I pulled the navy jacket around my shoulders again, I couldn’t help but grin again toward Key, who was still smiling about my lope off the field. I liked those guys and I was having fun, even amid the pressure of winning a game and then winning it like this. I’d never pitched in the playoffs, but I imagined every game felt just like it.

  Among the guys in our clubhouse, that dugout, there was a bunker mentality, and generations of Yankees players before and after us would admit the same. There had to be, given the pressures from ownership, the manager, media, and fans. Under Showalter, in particular, players were cautious because conspiracy theories abounded. There was a sense that anything you did or said, every eye roll, might have been reported to Steinbrenner or Showalter. We covered ourselves because, with only a few exceptions—Mattingly, for one—everyone was expendable. The Yankees had the money to cover their mistakes and go get the next guy. The coaches were especially vulnerable; they made hardly any money and so were easily disposed of. Showalter was so guarded, always seeming to talk out of the side of his mouth, like it was top-secret stuff. Honestly, I’d nod my head, but could barely make out what he was saying.

  Though my own struggles undoubtedly added to my perception of clubhouse suspicions, many of my teammates admitted their uneasiness, the nature of the Yankee beast. Had I pitched better, maybe it would have seemed different. As it was, I sensed the Yankees were disappointed with me, that teammates might have unconsciously distanced themselves from me because of it, and that made the clubhouse kind of a lonely place. Still, along with a deep respect for sturdy veterans Mattingly, Gallego, O’Neill, and Stanley, and a fun friendship with Pat Kelly, who lived in the city with his wife, Rebecca, I really enjoyed my fellow pitchers, guys like Key, Kamieniecki, and Mike Witt. Pitchers seemed to get one another, which was good, because so few others got us.

  I drew some water from the big bucket and found my regular place on the bench, back in the moment. Again I swung my foot over the floor, clearing the debris of exhilaration just as I would disappointment. I cleared my head and ran through what was next. Manny Ramirez would lead off the eighth inning. Out there, just outside my scope, the bottom of the seventh inning ended when Paul O’Neill flied to left field. Splashing the dugout floor with what was left on the bottom of the cup, I turned and placed it on the stack. There were seven.

  CHAPTER 15

  By the end of a warm afternoon in Oakland, on the final weekend of April 1991, two seasons and a month in the major leagues had my record at 22-30, my ERA at 4.34. For 1991 alone, I’d made four starts and lost them all. My ERA was 6.

  On the bright side, my quest to be recognized as simply a pitcher was fulfilled.

  The fresh public angle on Jim Abbott was that he was in over his head. More specifically, my command was poor, my curveball was spotty and, as a result, hitters had figured me out, primarily because two years before I’d been rushed from college to the big leagues. There were, however, fewer questions about how many hands I had.

  Nice story, decent guy, not getting enough outs. I’d given up more hits than anyone in baseball in 1990 and lost 14 games.

  After the promise of ’89, the Angels had fallen into mediocrity. We weren’t pitching or scoring runs like we once had, the team was aging faster than the calendar could keep up, and management answered by acquiring veterans past their primes. We were getting older, not younger, and worse, not better.

  By 1991, we were headed for a last-place finish in the AL West. Doug Rader would be fired in late August and replaced by Buck Rodgers. It was then I first considered the cold side of the game, when Rader—wearing a cowboy hat and a forced smile—returned as the former manager and hugged every man in the clubhouse. He’d believed in me. In late spring, I wasn’t winning. The issues that led to 246 hits allowed and 14 losses the season before hadn’t dissipated. In the club’s front office, serious consideration was given to sending me to the minor leagues.

  Asked his opinion, Marcel Lachemann told the baseball operations staff, “Well, that’s a bunch of bull. There’s no way he deserves to be sent out. In fact, you send this kid out, you send me with him.”

  Years later, Lach recalled, “I think they thought I was kidding, because they never put me to the test. When I left the meeting I thought, ‘What did I just say?’ But, it never came to that.”

  The game can be moody. It is cool and then comforting, warm and then entirely unjust. For no apparent reason, it began to like me again. There was no explanation, and I didn’t ask for one.

  Over the next five months, I was 18-7 with a 2.55 ERA. I shut out the New York Yankees in the Bronx in mid-May, shut out the Milwaukee Brewers over seven innings in mid-June, beat the eventual World Series champion Minnesota Twins twice in August, and won 9 of my last 12 starts. My curveball was effective. I worked the outside half of the plate to righties. I’d never been better.

>   In the midst of coming back from 0-4, I told Sports Illustrated, “It was the toughest thing I’ve gone through, baseball-wise, in a long time. In the back of your mind you think, ‘Maybe I just don’t have it. Maybe every lousy pitcher thinks that someday he’s going to get good.’ And then all of a sudden, your worst fears are out in the open, in public debate.”

  I still had Lach on my side, McClure in my ear, a developing feel for pitching on my fingertips and, if any of that failed, Harvey Dorfman in my head.

  Harvey was a sports psychologist. He was in his mid-fifties when Boras, intrigued by advances in the mental side of baseball, introduced us after my rookie year. By then, Harvey had served on the Oakland A’s staff for six years, as the brain coach sitting on the bench not far from the hitting and pitching coaches. Before that, he was an educator and coach and before that a soccer player and before that a child so stricken with asthma he could barely get out of bed to play with the other children.

  I didn’t know why Boras came to believe I was in need of a sports psychologist. When he suggested I go see Harvey, I looked at him so blankly he assumed he’d offended me. In fact, Boras had been considering bringing Harvey and me together for more than a year. Standing just off to the side of my first season in the majors, Boras had watched the stadiums fill when I pitched, he had watched the media swarm and the fans rush to me when I entered a hotel lobby. It was daunting, and it wasn’t commensurate with my performance so far. And Boras believed I’d be tested one day, when my performance did not match the expectations of the public or myself.

  On the night of my very first start, he’d looked around Anaheim Stadium and thought, Oh my God, how is he going to be able to put this in perspective?

  Performance fluctuates. Results fluctuate.

  As long as he’s on top of his game, Boras thought, all this works. What happens when he’s not? What happens when life gets serious? He was so strong climbing up the mountain. What happens when he gets to the top and has to look down?