Imperfect: An Improbable Life

by Jim Abbott

  Eighteen wins looked to Boras like the top of the mountain.

  Harvey and I met over lunch. A month later, I flew to Phoenix, where Harvey picked me up at the airport, two hours south of his home in Prescott, a small town in the Bradshaw Mountains. I’d spend the weekend with him.

  Harvey wasn’t one of those touchy-feely therapists. We drove an hour before he pulled into a diner where he could get a bowl of chili, and by the time we left I could tell he would never ask me what kind of tree I’d be and I wouldn’t be writing haikus describing my childhood. If he was sympathetic to the way I was born, he hid it behind the edginess of a New Yorker (he was born in the Bronx) and the demeanor of a coach (his old job).

  Harvey thought I was too nice. I knew that because he said, “You’re too nice.”

  When we returned to the car I told him, “You have made me talk more in an hour about my hand than I have in my entire life.”

  “Isn’t that why you’re here?” he said.

  We pulled out of the parking lot and Harvey shot me a look that said, That’s the freakin’ problem, pal.

  I couldn’t help but smile.

  For two days Harvey asked questions, I answered, and he took notes. He’d arrived at the sessions knowing what I was and what I’d done, if not who I was. He assumed the weekend would be more painful for me than it was for him, and he was correct.

  He asked if, as a kid, I’d ever been in a fight. When I said I hadn’t, he nodded as if he’d already known the answer. I’d been mugged in a stairwell in high school. And there were fights I should have taken up that I didn’t. I wasn’t proud of it.

  His observation: “You would do nothing to antagonize anybody into a confrontation. The last thing you wanted to hear was, ‘Ah, screw you, you stump-handed kid.’ You did not want to be disparaged. You placated people so there would be no name-calling. You didn’t want to hear the words.”

  I nodded, even if I wasn’t sure I agreed, which probably was his point.

  “There are a couple things to consider,” Harvey continued. “One, you can’t please everybody. Two, if you believe this perception of you is valid, you are living your life based on what other people believe you to be. You wear the mask long enough, it becomes your face.”

  Harvey had a lot of clients. More than a few had asked him to teach them to be jerks. It was the baseball thing, the competitor thing, the killer-instinct thing.

  But he and I talked about balance, about being strong without being insensitive, compassionate without being weak. My need to be liked, he determined, was so ingrained I’d become deferential to everyone. Had I continued on that course, he believed, I might have taken to deferring to hitters, as well. Even hitters. Imagine.

  We all have a sense of our own vulnerability, he said, and to that end we fake it till we make it. I couldn’t fake mine, he pointed out, because my vulnerability extended beyond my shirtsleeve. The best I could do was to put my hand in my pocket. By doing so, of course, I drew more attention to it, to the fact I was hoping to hide it.

  I hid my hand a lot, maybe unconsciously. I believed everybody was looking. And they probably weren’t. If so, maybe momentarily. But, I struggled with it. In nearly every photo from childhood, I’d buried my right hand in my pocket, or covered it with my left hand. Not even my parents had noticed. Even in childhood, I’d have rather avoided the subject, ducked the questions, and eliminated the expressions of pity.

  Harvey was right about these talks. They were painful. I hadn’t thought I was faking anything. I guess I thought of it as “coping.” Or “overcoming.” Or just pitching.

  Prodding, Harvey was continuously drawn to my tendency to, as he said, “Give myself away”—that is, to ignore the insults and slights of others. He concluded that such a lack of self-esteem could manifest itself in the amount of trust I took to the mound. He was right, though I wasn’t completely adrift. With the ball in my hand, I felt I had a direction—to show people I wouldn’t give in to my quite obvious vulnerability. It was not forward thinking, but a regular and reliable ambition. I didn’t understand it. It just was.

  The level I strove for as a boy and the challenges I took on through college, by the big leagues I wondered at times if they were enough. I wondered again if I belonged. Those voices might sink in over time, along with those questions, and I might be in serious danger of answering, “I don’t know.” I think that’s what Harvey was getting at. Whether I was 10-14 or 18-11, did I trust I was good enough? Did I have the conviction? Would I continue to believe in myself come those times when the greater of two wills would win?

  I liked Harvey. My career had sped off so quickly over the previous couple years I’d barely had a moment to make sense of it, and that’s when Harvey came along. He seemed a wise man who possessed a broad sense of the world and an ability to place baseball within it. Being twenty-two, I was searching for myself and looking in all the usual places, hoping to stumble into a truth by pulling random books from library shelves. None of it was deep enough for Harvey. But he provided an ideal outlet for points of investigation and discovery.

  It was just easier for me to sacrifice my self-interests if that meant peace and harmony—mine, my parents’, my teammates’, anyone’s. Of the messages I took away from Prescott, not the least was that I did not have to apologize for the way I was born, least of all to myself. And it was not for me to comfort others because of it.

  Harvey’s lessons would be easy to conjure in the few days immediately following our visits, but nearly out of reach amid the rigors of a baseball season. To that end, we stayed connected through books he’d recommend. Harvey was exceedingly literate and a bibliophile, and over the years he sent me dozens of books, or handwritten lists of works he believed worthwhile. I’d read them, at times searching for Harvey’s coded messages reinforcing the conversations we’d had. I’d grin at the passages clearly intended for me, such as the Cormac McCarthy line “It is always himself that the coward abandoned first.” Or another McCarthyism: “… those who have endured some misfortune will always be set apart but … it is just that misfortune which is their gift and which is their strength.”

  I was all over the place, thinking something would make sense somewhere.

  Harvey enjoyed my discoveries, even if he’d not intended a direct hit at all.

  “Sometimes,” he told me, “I use the musket mentality.”

  Where we diverged, however, was at the pitcher’s mound. Years after I’d earned my way onto it, I would not yield to those who tried to knock me off. Baseball still gave me the venue to fight back against all the other stuff in my head, and against what I assumed to be in other people’s heads. If anything, I evaluated my performances through the prism of my insecurities. I did believe I was letting people down when I didn’t win. And I did take losses hard, though not much harder than pitchers with two hands. I’d once heard of a pitcher who’d lost badly and afterward sat at his locker, silently carving up a baseball with a hunting knife. A little disappointment and reflection—a run through downtown Cleveland, say—seemed tame by comparison.

  I returned from the weekend feeling somewhat raw but unburdened, and I continued the self-examination. Maybe I was too nice, and maybe that was unusual in professional sports. But, maybe it wasn’t an act—or a mask—but a way to make me happier. Harvey probably wouldn’t buy it. Later, I sent him a photo. He hung it on his office wall at his home, alongside those of other athletes he’d counseled. I wrote, “Harvey, thanks. You are an inspiration to me.” And, of course, that made him laugh.

  “It was nice,” Harvey once said. “But, me? Inspirational? I appreciate it, of course. But, the choice of words. Say thank you. Can that other stuff.”

  He’d inspired me to think of who I was and what I wanted to be in ways I’d never thought of before. He inspired me to think of people and the journeys they have taken. He recognized that sports, to me, were validation. He told me, “You don’t need to validate who you are. You don’t need that. This is
who you are without this.” I don’t think he even cared much about the pitching.

  So, yes, he was an inspiration. Sometimes where he saw “other stuff,” I saw genuine feeling. That would piss him off, too, probably.

  I maintained my relationship with Harvey through the rest of my career, and until he passed away in the spring of 2011, mostly through our love of books, sometimes when I needed a kick in the rear end, and occasionally just to say hello. But I carried that weekend in Prescott with me, and maybe it was coincidence and maybe it wasn’t, but in the period of my life leading into and through my times with Harvey, I met my future wife. She just didn’t know it at the time.

  DANA DOUTY WAS a senior at UC Irvine, a college basketball player and a person grounded enough to be dubious of the whole professional baseball player thing. She came from a family of firefighters. Her brother had been a college pitcher who, two years before, was drafted by the Philadelphia Phillies.

  I should have been at spring training, but a labor impasse resulted in the owners’ lockout of the players until early March. So, I was at a party—hosted by a friend of a friend of Chuck Finley’s—instead. Dana was smart and beautiful and athletic, all of which had me quite nervous for our first date, dinner a few nights later with those somewhat mutual friends. It went well enough that I was somewhat torn when the lockout ended the following day. I packed up that morning, drove to Arizona for my second spring training, and the moment I returned asked Dana for a second date. We shared childhood and family experiences; we both saw the world as a good place, and I realized early on that she was far too decent of a person for me.

  She never asked about my hand. In that, I felt her strength, her certainty. Maybe she believed in me, but I translated it as a belief in herself. I admired her acceptance of it, and me. As I fell in love—it took moments—I became thankful she would take it on, to endure the second glances, to wonder what our children might have to overcome, and to make my life ours. Love, as a concept, to me means personal concessions. In our case, Dana did nearly all of the conceding. She wanted to come along, but not to nurse me; to stand alongside me. In many ways, she embodied the person Harvey was trying to teach me to become. I liked that in her, and I believed I was closer to being that person with her.

  I proposed—originally enough—on Valentine’s Day in 1991 and we were married after that season.

  In many ways that year was perfect. Dana’s love, and her company, and her calm, helped me to believe in myself. My pitching matured with the rest of my life. I won 18 games and finished third for the American League Cy Young Award. People were talking about my ability to pitch again, this time not to opine that I was terrible and should be sent to the minors, but to say I stood with the best pitchers in the league.

  The best part of it was not the validation of me (though I didn’t hate that), but the vindication for those who stayed with me: Rader, Lachemann, Finley, McCaskill, even Jimmie Reese, who—whether I’d won or lost—would drag his fungo bat into the outfield the next afternoon and hit me a hundred more. I recall every one of those afternoons as sunny and warm, the two of us camped in right field, me standing between two baseball caps and him sixty feet away, a half-dozen baseballs at his feet. It was Jimmie who transformed me from a decent fielder to a better one. He’d draw two batting gloves over his hands and give me a nod. I’d pantomime my delivery to the plate and with perfect timing he’d snap toward me a ground ball—crisp, like he’d hit the sweet spot of the bat every time. In his day, they’d say, Jimmie could pitch batting practice with that fungo bat. It was in these sessions I developed a greater rhythm for transferring the glove from my right hand to my left, and I was proud of the work we did. Jimmie would try to shoot balls inside the ball caps and past me. He bet me cans of Coke he could. I think maybe he owes me a six-pack or two.

  Rader used to say that Jimmie and I were put on earth to meet each other. Jimmie hung around almost ninety years to make it happen, and by then he was stooped and frail and angular, like he’d been carved from the very lathe he kept in his Westwood workshop. There, he made picture frames—he framed almost everything he came across—and his own fungo bats, cleaving them the length of the barrel so they were flat on one side and rounded on the other. Jimmie helped me to assimilate into the big leagues, then to survive them once I was there. I’d sit next to him on the bench during games, which he’d chart for Lach and the pitching staff. And in the spare moments Blyleven wasn’t sliding under the bench to hotfoot him or spitting sunflower seeds on the chart so Jimmie would have to tear it up and start over, we became friends. When I told him I’d become serious about a girl, he insisted on meeting Dana, afterward saying, “Beautiful smile, kid. Beautiful smile. Nice teeth.” He was kind and made me laugh and paid for every early-bird buffet meal we ever had together, during which he would remind me to watch my money and to invest in T-bills. He loved the T-bills.

  Jimmie died in 1994, at ninety-two. Because he hadn’t much family, I always thought of him as being survived by baseball. I didn’t keep much from my career, but I have two of his handmade fungoes, one signed to me, the other to Dana.

  The beauty of Jimmie, he was the same gentleman in 1991 as he had been the season before, when I lost 14, and was the same guy in 1992, when I pitched as well as I ever had and was 7-15, and the same again in 1993, when I was no longer an Angel.

  I’d miss him.

  From the moment I was drafted, I figured I’d be an Angel forever, like Al Kaline was a Tiger forever, and Alan Trammell and Lou Whitaker certainly would be. Growing up in Michigan in the era of free agency and Marvin Miller and rising salaries, I admired players such as Trammell who played for one team. I never heard about his contract negotiations. And every Opening Day he ran out to shortstop like there was no place else he could ever be. On the back of his baseball card, under TEAM, there was just a tall, endless stack of TIGERS. I wanted to be that guy, to be that reliable. Yet after my fourth season with the Angels I was in the middle of a very public contract negotiation and being portrayed as another greedy ballplayer rejecting money most people couldn’t fathom. Heck, I couldn’t fathom the money.

  It was the winter after the 1992 season, in which I’d lowered my ERA from my 18-win season and still lost 15 games. The Angels’ offense finished last in the American League in nearly every important category: we lost 90 games, finished 24 games out of the lead in the AL West and clearly were in transition. So, I wasn’t alone on the staff. As a team we had the third-best ERA in the league and yet Mark Langston lost 14 games and Chuck Finley and Bert Blyleven each lost 12 games. Little had gone right. Rader had been fired in late August the season before and the organization was finding its way under Buck Rodgers, a popular former Angel with a big personality who’d managed the Expos for a half-dozen seasons. Even a bus trip down the New Jersey Turnpike proved too much of a challenge for those Angels. In late May the first of two buses carrying the club from New York to Baltimore crashed into the woods, seriously injuring Rodgers and battering and bruising a dozen players and team personnel. I’d pitched into the eighth inning that night at Yankee Stadium, allowing only one run, and we lost anyway, and I left the Bronx thinking things could hardly get worse. Two hours later we were pulling guys out of a bus that was on two wheels and threatening to tumble sideways down a hill, the manager was moaning in pain, the second baseman’s ankle was the size of an ice bucket, the traveling secretary’s ribs were cracked, the bullpen catcher was bleeding like crazy, and the right fielder had punched the bus driver in the jaw.

  We were never in the race. The season ended, mercifully, but over the summer team general manager Whitey Herzog, Boras, and I had begun discussing a contract extension, two years before I would become a free agent. Boras was by nature opposed to contract extensions—he preferred the free-agent market, where teams drove up the cost of players on one another—but it was my desire to remain in Anaheim, and there was no harm in negotiating. We’d seemed to settle on the contract extending for four years,
which would cover two arbitration years and two years of free agency. Now it was about the money. When the team was in Baltimore in late August, Herzog placed a piece of paper in my locker, folded once. I opened it. He’d written, “$16 million.” At the time I would have been the highest-paid four-year player in the history of the game. I should have accepted.

  Just a couple weeks earlier, we—Boras, Herzog, co–general manager Dan O’Brien, and I—met for lunch and to decide my future, at McCormick & Schmick’s, a seafood place on Main Street in Irvine. Officially—and, it seemed, confidently—Herzog offered $16 million over four years. I nearly choked, it was so much money. Boras was somewhat cooler. He responded by sliding several pages of statistics across the table and countering at $19 million. It wasn’t what Whitey was hoping for, though I’m sure he half expected it. He barely looked at the packet Scott had prepared before tossing it dismissively back at him.

  “This type of shit,” Herzog announced to the table, “is what’s wrong with baseball nowadays.”

  That didn’t sound too good to me, but I left the meeting believing we were close, that a deal was likely, that we’d settle at $17.5 million, that I’d still be an Angel forever. I was thrilled and rushed home to tell Dana about it. Turned out, the Angels weren’t negotiating. They’d given us their best—and only—offer. I had no idea, but we’d way overshot what owner Gene Autry would pay and what Herzog had the patience for.

  After the note from Herzog in the clubhouse and lunch in Irvine, I would never again hear from the Angels about that contract. The season went on, September passed, and it hung in the air, neither agreed upon nor dismissed. And on a rainy night in early December, that contract was the furthest thing from my mind when Dana and I stood curbside at LAX, watching Dana’s mother approach in her car. We’d been in Hawaii on vacation. We were exhausted from the long flight. The weather was terrible. When I opened the car door, I knew something was wrong. Something had happened. Dana’s mom had been crying.