Imperfect: An Improbable Life

by Jim Abbott

  The game is about results. I thought about the inspiration I derived from the kids who came to visit me in those stadiums, and their refusal to let the circumstances of their lives become an excuse. Because of the temptation in my own life to use my hand as both a shield and sword, the examples being set by those children were unforgiving. In that way, I didn’t always measure up to them. The choice to use my hand as a defense against someone who was fairly calling me an underachiever was too easy. And in the first few strides, leaving Curry standing at my locker, I was already disappointed in myself. He was fair. And simply because I was trying as hard as I thought I could, I should not have held myself above the criticism. For all the credit I’d been given over the years for being tough, maybe I wasn’t.

  I never apologized to Curry. It’s strange how you feel about the writers who cover your team. I liked most of them. And yet because of the inherent terms of the relationship, I could never be close with them. As ballplayers, we held an automatic posture, a defensive one, even when the reporters were right. Especially, perhaps, when they were right.

  On that day, I’d given in. I had used my hand as justification for expecting a kind review, and my conscience stung. All this talk of being a role model, all this talk about rising above the challenge, and when the scrutiny became intense I ducked for cover. I carried that day for a long time.

  I finished the season 11-14, and we finished seven games behind the Blue Jays.

  After a second—and mediocre—season with the Yankees that began much like the first and ended in August because of the player strike, Dana and I were ready to go. The promise of adventure in New York had become rather heavy on our lives, the mood of which was predicated on me winning baseball games, which wasn’t happening often enough.

  We packed with a good idea I wouldn’t return and with no idea of where we would be next. Dana flew to California. I drove cross-country with Billy, a springer spaniel pup I named for Yankees coach Billy Connors. My previous dog had been hit by a car and Connors found another like it, presenting it to me while the team was in Anaheim. Billy—the dog—returned to New York on the team charter, and as he flitted about the aisle, I thought this was probably the only dog to ever fly aboard a Yankees plane. George Steinbrenner might have disagreed.

  Free agency was a player’s reward after six years of major-league service time and was in Boras’s wheelhouse. For me, after two uneven seasons with the Yankees, free agency meant I didn’t have a job, and I’d have to wait at least through the strike, which lasted eight months, to get one. And some team out there was going to have to believe in me again.

  When the strike ended in late March 1995, I met with the Angels in a conference room at Anaheim Stadium, Boras and I on one side, general manager Bill Bavasi and Mead, promoted from public relations to assistant general manager, on the other. Boras, as he had almost three years earlier, slid a folded piece of paper across the table. Bavasi, as Herzog had almost three years earlier, unfolded the paper and, ultimately, passed.

  I had an offer from the Cleveland Indians. And I got a call from the Chicago White Sox, though not from the general manager. Robin Ventura and Kirk McCaskill had reported to spring training with the White Sox. Ventura, my Olympics teammate, was their starting third baseman. McCaskill had become a full-time reliever for the White Sox the season before, but had been assured an opportunity in camp to become a starter again.

  They called from the clubhouse. Would I come? What if they talked to management? How much money would it take? They hung up and in their spikes and uniforms walked to the office of assistant general manager Danny Evans.

  “Jim Abbott’s still out there,” McCaskill told Evans. “He’d love to come. You have the money for him?”

  The next day, I was on a flight for Florida, for spring training, for a team willing to take a chance on me and into a clubhouse of friends. McCaskill, who’d gone to camp eager for a place in the rotation, not only found me a job, he found me his job.

  I desperately wanted to pitch well again. In the three seasons since I’d won 18 games for the Angels, I’d become average. No matter how I prepared, how many hours I toiled in the weight room, how many mechanical adjustments I made, how many scouting reports I memorized, how hard I tried to throw my fastball, I’d become a guy who was barely making it. I couldn’t get it right. Six years in, twenty-seven years old, I wasn’t the player I wanted to be. I couldn’t believe how difficult it had become to win a baseball game. Fastballs come and go, but not at twenty-seven, and not in an arm that felt loose and strong.

  Determined to take my career back, and unsure exactly how to do it, I went to the row of spring training mounds and threw a pitch. And then another. When the exhibition games came, I went to those mounds, and threw more pitches.

  And still couldn’t get anybody out.

  Rick Peterson was the bullpen coach of the White Sox. Or, more accurately, the pitching coach of the relievers, something general manager Ron Schueler, pitching coach Jackie Brown, and Peterson had worked out.

  During one of my failed spring outings, Schueler stood beside Peterson and said, “What do you think?”

  “You know what, Ron, until I get this on film, I’m not going to know for sure,” Peterson said, “but with the naked eye, he’s got his glove on his hand before the ball’s going through the hitting zone. That’s not just the cut fastball now. He’s cutting pitches off.”

  “Okay,” Schueler said. “Why?”

  “I don’t know. But, if I had to guess, he’s been smoked. He’s scared to death of the ball coming back. There’s no way he can throw a ninety-plus-mile-an-hour fastball and put that glove on his hand before the ball gets in the zone. He’s not finishing.”

  Almost a year before, in a game against the White Sox at Yankee Stadium, I’d thrown a fastball to Frank Thomas. Seemingly as the pitch cleared my fingertips, pain bolted from high on my left thigh. I’d never seen the line drive. When Thomas returned to the dugout he told McCaskill he’d never hit a ball harder. The next day the bruise started at my thigh and ended at my ankle.

  I’d never really thought about defending myself on the mound. That was for other people to worry about. The ball Thomas hit, had it been a couple feet higher, might have killed me. But, if I was shortening my delivery as a result, going for the glove too soon and cutting off my momentum to the plate, it was subconscious. It was instinct. It was survival.

  Peterson sat me down. He was an interesting guy and a good pitching coach.

  “Let me ask you this question,” he said. “Do you know how many guys have ever died on a baseball field?”

  I said I didn’t, but seemed to remember one, Ray Chapman, who in the early 1920s was hit in the head by a pitch and died hours later. Peterson made a circle with his five fingers.

  “None,” he said.

  I wasn’t going to argue the technicality.

  “So, if it happened to you, you’d go right to the Hall of Fame. They’d take your uniform right off and ship it to the Hall of Fame. I know that. They’d entomb you in the Hall of Fame.”

  There was that.

  “If you need to transfer that glove to your hand before that ball goes through the hitting zone, I’d suggest you go home and stop playing, because you’ve got no chance at competing at this level. You’re going to have to give this up and overcome this fear.”

  So, he said, I had to finish every pitch, complete my delivery, and when I did the ball would have more life. And if, as a result of following through, I would be left defenseless, then I could be bloodied and wheeled away to the Hall of Fame. Either, I figured, would be preferable to what I was already doing.

  If nothing else, it gave me something to work toward and believe in, and that by itself was more than I had had to hold on to for months.

  By late July, I was 6-4. My ERA was 3.36, more than a run better than the season before. From the end of May through the middle of summer, my ERA was under 3. Under Brown and Peterson, I developed some consisten
cy with the curve, cutter, slider, and a baby changeup—variety and speed changes I hadn’t always had. In terms of velocity, I wasn’t Nolan Ryan, but neither was I defenseless. I could be aggressive, and it was exhilarating. I’d wondered if I would be that guy again, and now I was, and in Chicago, surrounded by good friends. Dana and I were where we wanted to be. We could breathe again. And we should have known it wouldn’t be that easy.

  On July 27, I was traded back to the Angels in a six-player trade. The White Sox were out of the race. The Angels had an eight-game lead in the AL West. While I was somewhat conflicted over leaving Chicago, the Angels by all appearances were going to the playoffs. And it was home, still. And maybe the hard feelings and misunderstandings of three years before would be lost in the homecoming and in a pennant. Maybe it could be easy again.

  When I took the ball for the first time back in that uniform, I beat the Milwaukee Brewers on a Saturday night in Milwaukee. The Angels led the division by ten games. Three weeks later, by the middle of August, we led by 10½ games. The team had grown up in the time I was gone. Lach was the manager. The lineup was laced with strong young players—J. T. Snow, Garret Anderson, Jim Edmonds, Tim Salmon, Gary DiSarcina—and the veterans Chili Davis and Tony Phillips. Chuck Finley and Mark Langston were formidable at the top of the rotation, as were Lee Smith and Troy Percival at the back of the bullpen.

  After years of grasping at roster-building philosophies, the Angels had discovered something that worked for them, and we were running off with the AL West. We thought so.

  A month later, we were in second place. Two nine-game losing streaks, a lot of lopsided scores, and a near miraculous four-game sweep of the Oakland A’s over the final long weekend of the season put us in a one-game playoff against the Seattle Mariners and Randy Johnson in the Kingdome. If we won, I had the start the following day in New York against the Yankees in the division series. We lost, 9-1. The collapse was complete.

  As horrifically as the season had ended—and the flight home from Seattle was among the dreariest three hours I’d ever spent—I was encouraged. I was proud of my pitching again. The team was young and seemed to have many contending years in front of it. Soon, the Angels would sign me to a three-year contract extension. After three years away, I was comfortable. I was going to be in the right place at the right time again. I was so sure of it, Dana and I decided we were settled and grown up enough to start a family.

  FOR GOING ON thirty years, I’d not asked my parents what happened to me. I sensed from an early age there would be no answer, or nothing to be gained from an answer. I was born this way, and that would be enough of an explanation. It would have to be. My duty was to figure it out from there.

  Dana and I were considering having a child, however. For better or worse, I had accepted my disability. I wasn’t sure if I had the authority—or the courage—to accept a disability for a son or daughter, too.

  When Dana mused about a little boy or girl, and I warmed at the thought of her as a mother and me as a father, I became ever more fearful that I carried a genetic predisposition for physical imperfection. I’d managed, but what if our child couldn’t? What if the condition was worse? I would be responsible for that. Would it be selfish to bring into the world a child who would be so challenged?

  There were times when I met children who had such challenges and for a moment I’d have to catch my breath, just imagining their daily fight.

  I believed ardently that disabilities do not confine our lives to struggle. I also was unsure if I would knowingly take the risk. The guilt I would have felt for my child and for my wife would be so hard to bear. I didn’t know if I was strong enough for that. I’d accepted it once. Twice, I just didn’t know.

  So I called my mother and asked her what she knew. There were no answers, she said.

  Then, in a quiet moment in the Anaheim Stadium clubhouse, as our season was faltering, I approached the team physician, Dr. Lewis Yocum, the renowned orthopedist. I told him what I’d been thinking about, starting a family, being sure. He recommended a genetic specialist at UC Irvine.

  The day of the appointment, I could barely keep food down for the nerves. I continually looked at Dana, so in love with her for facing my insecurities with me. We sat before the doctor, a stranger who studied me like the doctors of my own childhood had. Her questions were pointed, my answers vague. And near the end of what I feared would be a terrible, heartbreaking day, the doctor nodded at us reassuringly and said, “These things happen. I don’t think you’re at any risk of passing this on.”

  By March, Dana was pregnant with a girl we’d call Maddy.

  In early summer, Dana had her first ultrasound examination. Studying the monitor, to myself I counted to ten. Over and over, I counted to ten. By the time I was done, I struggled to hold back tears. I wished to hide from Dana how close I was to fear. She looked at me, took my hand, and smiled.

  CHAPTER 16

  The flagpole at the old Yankee Stadium—the tallest one with the American flag on it—was in left-center field, where it rose out of and towered over Monument Park.

  In there, monuments to Lou Gehrig, Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio, and Miller Huggins were on red marble slabs, while other legends were depicted on reverential plaques. Not only was it a nice place to visit, it was a pretty good place to pitch to. The fence was almost four hundred feet from the plate and the ball didn’t carry well to left-center field, which is why left-handed pitchers were at something of an advantage: More right-handed hitters meant fewer lefties knocking pop-ups into the right-field bleachers.

  Just beyond the outfield fence, the pole stood in front of the frieze and the banners spaced perfectly along the top rim of the ballpark and the buildings of the Bronx beyond that. There were scoreboards and advertisements on the back wall, and pennants whipping in the breeze—a lot to meet the eye.

  But with two out in the eighth inning, a runner at first base and a little time to kill, it was the flagpole that drew my attention—or, more precisely, the golden ball at the top of it. In that moment, with the crowd crying out and clenching its fists, with so much seemingly at stake and four outs to go and Sandy Alomar Jr. taking forever to pine-tar and resin his bat and then take his warm-up swings, I reassured myself in a place fifty feet in the air. This was my habit. When my confidence ebbed or I found myself giving the hitter or the situation more than I should, I would step off the rubber and find that focal point, imagining the word TRUST written confidently in sturdy block letters across the golden ball. It was a reminder to myself to return to my strengths, to what I do best. It was about presence and awareness, being in the moment, living with the result because the process and the journey were sound and pure.

  Anyway, it had always made sense to me.

  Ten minutes before, I’d dropped a seventh water cup on my dugout stack, laid my jacket on the bench, and exhaled hard. This was the inning I’d lost my no-hitter to Bo on an elevated cutter he flared into center field. I wanted to win. I wanted the no-hitter.

  So I went after Manny Ramirez with cutters early, which got me to a 2-and-2 count. The crowd groaned every time plate umpire Ted Hendry ruled a ball and applauded every strike and shrieked at every swing whether the ball was put in play or not, all of which was fun and scary and so thrilling.

  I was trying to stay in the game, trying to keep my mind on executing every pitch. I was thinking, “Outs. Just get outs,” which is a little broad, but better than having my thoughts dart all over the place. Throughout my career, a no-hitter almost never entered my mind because I didn’t have what baseball people would think of as classic no-hit stuff. I gave up hits and then I got ground balls and double plays and moved the game along that way. But, you come a certain distance, you get twenty-one outs, and you might as well go get it. So I threw a changeup Ramirez swung over the top of and got my twenty-second out, which led to an odd moment. Ramirez’s follow-through was long and, because he’d been fooled on the pitch, a bit wild. The bat crashed into Nokes
’s left shoulder. Nokes winced and rolled to the ground, and I, thinking the ball had gotten free on the strikeout, dashed toward him before realizing the ball was in his mitt. Okay, so I was jumpy.

  By then, pockets of fans were standing and shouting for every pitch. And so a first-pitch strike to Candy Maldonado, a cutter that sliced through the middle of the strike zone, brought thundering applause. The next pitch—another cutter, this one up and in—jammed Maldonado, who fisted a routine grounder to Randy Velarde at shortstop.

  There were two out. Four to go, starting with Jim Thome, the dangerous left-handed hitter. He took two cutters, both away, the first a strike and the second a ball. On the third pitch, thinking Thome had already hit the ball hard once against me and was looking kind of comfortable, I dropped my arm angle to three-quarters for a fastball that Thome missed by six inches. I hadn’t used that near-sidearm delivery for the previous twenty-five hitters and would do it only once more, but it seemed right for Thome. Ahead 1 and 2, I missed with two cutters and then with a curveball, none all that close, so I walked him, which bothered me, because I’d followed the best pitch of the day with three that lacked faith or precision, that lacked trust.

  The moment, I knew, had crept into my head, alongside hope. Hope would do me no good. Because he’d hit a line drive in the sixth inning, Thome was a threat. I pitched to miss his bat, so I had become a contact pitcher pitching away from contact, deserting the aggressiveness that had gotten me this far.

  Which was when I found the golden ball. Junior Ortiz wasn’t going to hit. Sandy Alomar Jr. was. Alomar came out of the dugout and slathered up his bat. Waiting, I stood off to the side of the mound, seeing TRUST across that ball in the sky. It seemed so easy. The plan was the same, to throw the ball to the strike zone and let its natural movement carry it to the end of the bat, or toward the handle. Yes, trust.