Imperfect: An Improbable Life

by Jim Abbott

  “You’ve been traded,” she said.

  In a hotel room in Louisville, Kentucky, where baseball’s annual winter meetings were being held, Tim Mead opened his window and felt the cold air whip against his face. Before he would write the press release Herzog had ordered him to write, Mead screamed his frustration into the night, a primal profanity that jarred loose his own tears. As he sat at an unfamiliar desk and typed the words—Jim Abbott … Yankees … pitchers Jerry Nielsen and Russ Springer, first baseman J. T. Snow—his phone rang. He said hello. I asked if it was true. He said it was.

  I was stunned. Dana and I both were. And hurt. It wasn’t about going to the Yankees yet, it was about leaving the Angels. I rolled it all around in my head countless times—the faces of my teammates, my friends, Dana’s family, her mom, the contract negotiations, Herzog’s biting words. I didn’t think we had rejected their offer and they never actually said, “Sign it or you’re gone.” I would have signed it. I would have stayed.

  The following days were muddled, an eddy of regret and anger that eventually slowed and then stilled, leaving acceptance. Mead set up a press conference so I could answer some questions, which I showed up for and immediately regretted. As hard as I tried to keep it upbeat, I felt I’d sounded whiny about the failed negotiations and the trade. It all seemed so terribly wrong, like first I’d gone along with Boras’s negotiation strategy and then with Mead’s media strategy, and they’d both meant well, but I should have known better. Not only would I not be an Angel forever, but it was ending disgracefully. Instead of keeping my mouth shut and moving on, I kept trying to justify the negotiations, trying to get Angel fans to like and forgive me.

  When I arrived late morning there were twenty-five reporters in a small ballroom at the Doubletree Hotel, a few blocks from Anaheim Stadium. Mead believed the fans needed to hear from me, that it was the right thing to do. “Closure,” he kept saying. “People need closure.”

  He felt so strongly about it that he organized the media event without the Angels’ permission, and he was scolded by senior management when the morning newspapers carried the accounts of it.

  A few days later the letters to the editor in the L.A. Times were so hurtful. To the people who’d penned them, I’d become the player I never wanted to be. I was greedy and selfish and ungrateful.

  Jackie Autry, owner Gene Autry’s wife, called a few nights later. It was late and it seemed she had been crying, blaming it all on Boras, saying she and Gene didn’t like him very much, which put them in the majority of baseball owners.

  I had chosen Boras when I was twenty, when all that was guaranteed was that very first check. Fairly new to the industry, he’d negotiated a big bonus for Cris Carpenter, a right-hander out of Georgia, in the 1987 draft. The first pick of that draft—Ken Griffey Jr.—signed with the Seattle Mariners for $160,000. Carpenter, taken fourteenth overall by the St. Louis Cardinals, also received $160,000. That was good enough for me.

  But this seemed wrong.

  Later on, Boras’s style sometimes bothered me. As he built his firm and reputation, there came clubhouse talk about his aggressiveness both at the negotiating table and in pursuit of other clients. I defended him. Almost immediately the Autry-owned Angels had problems with him and hinted I was wrong for employing him. Boras called their tactics “the oldest trick in the book,” but I wasn’t so sure. I know that I probably disappointed Boras, too. His refusal, I believed, to consider what other people thought of him (or me) didn’t match up with my hypersensitivity. In the end what attracted me to him—the unyielding toughness that bordered on antagonism—also pushed me away. And maybe that’s why he thought I needed Harvey.

  While I was right that he cared little for how he was perceived (it wasn’t, after all, his job to be liked), Boras was disappointed in himself for the way he played the negotiations. For one of the few times in a career that would continue long after I retired, Boras had become emotionally attached to a player, and therefore an outcome. He believed the Angels—Herzog, O’Brien, the Autrys—had mistreated me through their hard-line negotiations. Boras saw people in the seats and on the concession lines. He saw a community that fawned over me. And he saw a good pitcher, which he equated to value for a franchise. And he believed that was worth more than a take-it-or-leave-it offer.

  In the hours after negotiations failed and I was traded, Boras regretted his tactics, which were driven by anger. He wished he had done better by me, that he could have looked above what he considered to be deplorable conduct by the Angels, and kept me in Anaheim.

  Herzog had called him in the final hours and told him, “Look, you better take it or we’re going to trade him.”

  Boras did not think Herzog was bluffing. He simply got mad.

  “What?” he said aloud when he put down the phone. “Move Jim Abbott? What are you thinking?”

  Even as he became less popular with teams, his results were so good I couldn’t complain. Indeed, in some ways I don’t think I was ever fair to Boras, because I never let on about my discomfort with his ambition. Swallowing potential issues until they became full-blown crises was a lifelong habit of mine, and on this occasion it got me traded to the Yankees. While I was sure Boras and I viewed the world differently—very differently at times—he was incredibly loyal. He thought I was a better pitcher than I thought I was, for one, which could be inspiring. He surrounded himself with the kind of bright and savvy baseball people—vice president and former Olympic teammate of mine Mike Fiore, Harvey, conditioning director Steve Odgers—that suggested to me he understood his own weaknesses.

  None of that mattered to Jackie Autry, who told me Herzog had talked Gene and her into the $16 million offer, but then came to believe we would never sign a long-term contract. Again and again she said she didn’t like “the people you have working for you,” that I should hire a different agent—Dennis Gilbert, she said—instead. And she’d begged Herzog to trade me to Toronto, away from the “vicious media” in New York, but Whitey told her he couldn’t get the same players from the Blue Jays. She finished by warning that you should never turn down your first million dollars (though I’d made more than that the previous season) and intimating that I’d been angling to get myself back to Detroit. It wasn’t true.

  I couldn’t dismiss Jackie so easily. The Autrys had come to my wedding. I loved Mr. Autry. I once had him autograph a ball for my grandmother, who adored him. He would recall visiting Flint while on tour and he loved sharing the story with me. To have things play out this way was difficult and demoralizing. The Angels were all I knew; they were my baseball family.

  Boras had also called. His focus was New York and how the city and the Yankees were great opportunities for me. Beyond the new lifestyle and the new team, he said he easily could get a contract offer comparable to the Angels’. As it turned out, we went to salary arbitration and lost, the hearing being my first real encounter with the Yankees. So, instead of being surrounded by friends and family with the Angels for $16 million over four years, I was introducing myself around and looking for a place to live in New York, and for a lot less money in a one-year contract. I wouldn’t regret the move to New York, but I didn’t know it at the time. What I did know, what I did think about, was how there are decisions in our times that are truly life-changing, but at the moment they seem like they can be put off for another day. Then, suddenly and regretfully, you find that circumstances—or somebody else—has made the decision for you.

  After considering the suburbs of New Jersey, Connecticut, and Westchester County, Dana and I slowly turned our attention to New York City. We found an apartment on the Upper East Side, and during spring training Dana returned to furnish the place. Intimidated—but slightly exhilarated—by the commotion of Manhattan, and convinced that everyone but she knew exactly where they were going, she waved down a cab, headed downtown, and with some relief reached a store that rented furniture. She paid her fare and stepped out of the cab, straight into two men who’d taken their fist-f
ight into the street.

  “Where am I?” she thought, clutching her purse tight and hurrying into the shop.

  We were far from Orange County, for one, far from the familiar faces at the market, from the family dinners on Sunday evenings. After the initial shock and sadness, we’d talked ourselves into the adventure of New York City and the Yankees. Dana was determined to put her head down, walk fast, be decisive, turn her wedding stone inward toward her palm, and get on with it. I was determined to restart my career for a team that, if not as homey as the Angels, certainly would win more baseball games.

  The first time I was on an airplane it was to visit Princeton when I was a senior in high school. My parents were behind that. I had no chance of being accepted. My host drove a few of us to New York City, where we gaped at the skyline, ate pizza, marveled as the waiter brought four high school kids beers without hesitation, and watched all the people try, and fail, to stay out of one another’s way. I fell in love with the place.

  The second time I was on a plane was for The Phil Donahue Show, and the third time was for Good Morning America. I stayed in Midtown hotels with marble floors and soaring ceilings, had long black cars pick me up at the curb, and then went on television. New York was a darned fine place, as far as I was concerned.

  Of course, it was one thing to visit, another to be kicked to one of those curbs by the only organization I’d known. Fortunately, I wouldn’t be alone. I had Dana. And over five weeks after the 1992 season, the Yankees traded for Paul O’Neill, traded for me, signed Spike Owen, and Jimmy Key. For a four-headed press conference, the club put us up in a suite at The Plaza and heralded the return of the late great Yankees, and it struck me that playing for this team in this city would be a glamorous life.

  For a short time, it seemed like it was meant to be.

  The Yankees were the Yankees, even when they weren’t. They hadn’t been to a World Series in twelve years and hadn’t won one in fifteen years. Yet, they remained the team of Ruth and DiMaggio and Mantle. Thurman Munson had died fourteen summers before, but in the Yankee Stadium clubhouse his locker—the one nearest the trainer’s room—remained unoccupied. The old place still bore the fine footprints of the greatest the game had ever seen, along with the rattling footfalls of George Steinbrenner. Even at a time when they had gone four years without a winning season and were routinely outplayed and outdrawn by the crosstown Mets, the Yankees were special. My heart leapt every time I walked along that dim corridor and turned right into the clubhouse.

  I hoped there was something to a fresh start. Unlike the Angels, who were on the decline, the Yankees had a chance to be competitive, and then to recapture the city. The general manager, Gene Michael, was building a good team. Don Mattingly, who in my mind stood with some of the franchise’s greats, was optimistic about the changes. After serving two and a half years of a lifetime ban for spying on Dave Winfield, Steinbrenner was in charge again, and loud about it. He’d come off the suspended list declaring, “Jim Abbott has to be a hero in New York,” the kind of thing all the players would chuckle about, except the guy who had to wear it around for a week. I had a feeling that were I ever to be traded from the Yankees, I would never get a weepy phone call from George.

  Barely a month later, not only wasn’t I a hero, I wasn’t winning a lot of baseball games. A headline in one of the morning papers read, ABBOTT’S STILL UNDERWHELMING. In another: ABBOTT’S PROBLEM: A MINOR LEAGUE FASTBALL.

  That was about the time Dana started hiding the newspapers and magazines.

  I liked New York, its energy, its demands for accountability. It was a lot to handle, sure. But, cast from the insular world of the Angels and Orange County, Dana and I to some extent found ourselves in New York. There was nothing quite like being in that place, in those years, in that fishbowl, with a whole career ahead of us.

  It would have been great to bring a fastball along. That certainly would have softened the edges of the expectations carried by Steinbrenner and the city, and healed the jarring experience of salary arbitration that had me wondering why the Yankees had even traded for me, and eased the creeping sense that the pennant race—the first in the Bronx in seven seasons—had gone off without me.

  Buck Showalter, the Yankees manager, used to say New York is a “snowball town, both ways.” The trick was to keep it tumbling in the right direction, and to somehow keep from being swallowed up in it. The guys who’d been there awhile looked right through the noise and clutter. The rest of us tried.

  The season, and Dana’s and my life in it, swung in all sorts of directions. At home, we embraced the city and its people, at least the ones who didn’t shout critical things at me from the street corners. I’d underestimated how difficult it was to be anonymous in a place with seven million people. Everybody—everybody—had a comment. Sometimes it was nice, other times not so nice. And it was incessant. On the field, I could be very precise with my pitches or very hittable because of them, depending on the night. The Yankees hadn’t traded for me to be erratic, and that’s what I’d become. I was supposed to be a number one starter, or at least a number two to Key’s number one. I was having a difficult time getting lefties out, and I wasn’t winning on the road. At the end of April I was 1-4, and by the end of summer I was 9-11, and the Yankees were growing in their disappointment with me.

  Michael became alarmed at my lack of velocity and my inability to throw a straight fastball. He would pull Showalter aside and complain, “Buck, he’s throwing all cutters. You guys have to get him off the cutter. He’s got to throw some straight fastballs to keep the hitters honest. The hitters are thinking in. They’re all looking in. They’re all off the plate and they’re giving him the outside part of the plate.”

  For his crusty exterior, Showalter actually felt bad for me. He felt the snowball coming. I discovered later he wasn’t even that mad at me for leaving the clubhouse in Cleveland, but rather worried for me. He, like the rest of the Yankees, and like me, had counted on more. When Michael came to him, Showalter simply shrugged. Their radar guns had my fastball at 85 mph. I’d lost almost 10 mph and couldn’t get it back.

  “He doesn’t have the bullets in his arsenal,” he told the GM. “He’s not defenseless, but there’s no margin for error. The secondary pitch just isn’t there.”

  They were frustrated, and it wasn’t long before the media began to feed on that. On a morning in late August, at a time I was pitching reasonably well but needed to win more if we were to stay close to the Blue Jays, The New York Times ran a story—it was more like a graphic, really, headlined, A PENNANT TRIES TO GROW IN THE BRONX—that combined my season with fellow starter Melido Perez’s and read, “The excuses are growing old. Solid starts and games that could have or should have been won by these two underachievers are no longer important; only victories are.”

  I read through it again. Underachiever?

  It wasn’t a word I was comfortable with.

  The piece was written by Jack Curry, a young and talented writer who had a solid reputation in the clubhouse.

  I waited by my locker for the writers to arrive. Usually there were dozens of them. At 3:30 exactly they’d stream through the heavy metal door, searching for stories for their early deadlines, eager to hound the guy swinging a hot bat or to corner the lost soul in a horrific slump.

  When he walked in, I was holding the morning Times in my hand.

  “Jack,” I said.

  Reporters knew when a story they’d written would bring a confrontation. Some aimed for it. Curry wasn’t an instigator. But the sight of me clutching the newspaper told him all he’d needed to know.

  “What is this?” My voice raised as I held up the newspaper.

  Other reporters, standing a few yards away, watched and listened. The sight of one of their own in an altercation was great theater, of course, and carried the potential of a story.

  Curry explained it was an article about who needed to perform better if the Yankees were going to catch the Blue Jays.
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br />   “ ‘Underachiever’?” I quoted.

  Curry understood: I wasn’t being defensive about the season so much as I was about my life.

  “You always told me you wanted to be treated like everybody else,” he said. “I used that word to describe your season.”

  I hated confrontation, probably because I wasn’t very good at it. I was embarrassed that my feelings had been hurt. I tried to keep the red out of my face. And then I had no idea how to end what I’d started.

  I left the newspaper at my locker, shook my head at Curry to show how deeply I was offended, and stalked off to the refuge of the trainer’s room.

  When I was gone and the scene still hung in the room, a fellow writer told Curry he should have known better, that if he was going to rip a player in the Times, he should have ripped one who didn’t read the Times. Most guys, the writers believed, read the Post or the Daily News, if anything.

  But Curry was reassessing his word choice.

  “Did I go too far?” he wondered.

  I hadn’t gotten to the trainer’s room before regretting the confrontation. Curry’s assessment was accurate. And I was wrong to be angry with him. Though Harvey might have applauded the courage to defend myself, he wouldn’t have approved of its motivation.

  The fact was, I—my pitching, my results—was a disappointment to the Yankees and their fans. But I was the last to see it. Kirk McCaskill and I played regular rounds of golf in the winters. He’d once observed that when you miss a putt, of all the people on the green, you are the last to recognize the ball isn’t going in. Spread over months, even over two seasons, I think I was the last in New York to realize this ball wasn’t rolling in the right direction.

  I naively assumed my past efforts and record would be factored in to an analysis of how I had performed, and then what could be expected out of future performance. And then I was too immature to understand how illogical that was. Harvey would have told me to toughen up. New York got to me.