Imperfect: An Improbable Life

by Jim Abbott

  “You’re closer than you think,” he said.

  I doubt it, I thought, and found a seat on a bus—the one Michael Jordan had bought for his own minor-league ride—bound for Huntsville.

  Slowly, I began to pitch better. Well enough, in fact, that after eight starts in Birmingham, Schueler moved me to Triple-A Calgary.

  “Good news, Dana!” I shouted over the phone. “I’m going to be a Cannon!”

  The air was cool enough to feel like baseball weather. My velocity was better. Not what it once was, but better. I was getting outs. I was gaining confidence. When I’d made five starts, Schueler came to me in the clubhouse and held out his hand.

  “A jersey with twenty-five on it is waiting for you in Chicago,” he said. “You’ve got the Yankees Saturday night.”

  The Yankees would win 114 games in ’98. They’d come a long way since I’d been there, winning a World Series in ’96 and poised to run off three more in a row. But I didn’t care. Two years had passed since I pitched in the major leagues.

  From Lake Michigan to Hickory to Winston-Salem to Birmingham to Calgary to Chicago, each level, again, felt a little like a gift. With the Yankees of Derek Jeter and Paul O’Neill and Tino Martinez and Bernie Williams laid before me, Dana in a box seat behind home plate, the grass of a major-league infield under my feet, and the lights of a major-league ballpark over my head, the moment—and the journey back—seemed almost unfathomable.

  I pitched into the seventh inning. On a meaningless September night for a White Sox team that would finish well out of first place, I’d had few prouder experiences on a baseball field. We beat the Yankees. And no matter what happened from there, I’d finished things differently.

  I won five games for the White Sox in September. I pitched okay over those five starts. The White Sox scored forty-one runs in them, which helped. I was encouraged enough to sign that winter with the Milwaukee Brewers, as they assured me a place in their rotation, which seemed important.

  It didn’t work. This time I knew it wouldn’t ever again. This ordeal would be less solitary.

  I retired mid-summer 1999, a little more than a decade after it all began. I was thirty-one, in my prime. I was also in Milwaukee, pitching out of the bullpen for the Brewers, and not very well. My ERA was around 7. My cutter was neither hard nor quick. Over the years I’d heard older teammates say the hitters would tell them when they were done and, well, it was becoming unanimous. Again.

  I’d made it all the way back and that, at least, was meaningful. Well, some of the way back.

  I should have stayed in Chicago, with a team and people I knew. Instead, I went to the Brewers, figured I was ready to resume my big-league career, and was wrong. I was so wrong I couldn’t wait to get away.

  I retired with eighty-seven wins and wondering why it all ended so abruptly. Where were the next ten years? How could I be sent away now, with a body so young? Wasn’t I going to do this forever? I’d left the game once before, been run off before, but my head and my heart told me then it was not permanent.

  This was going to be permanent.

  I wish I could have gone on pitching. Maybe I could have for somebody, in some role, and found a way to get outs. To survive. Maybe I could have remade myself as a pitcher, come up with a way to throw a ball to the outside corner against right-handers, become a side-armer, developed that splitter Rodgers was always talking about, something. Maybe, if I kept working at it.

  But I was miserable again, and not just as a ballplayer. As a person, the unhappiness had resurfaced, crept up on me like that kid from North Carolina off third base so many years ago. I needed to cast it away forever, the part of my life that was hurting me. Amazingly again, that was baseball. I wasn’t who I wanted to be anymore. The failure—it just never stopped—was exhausting and agonizing. In Milwaukee, I wasn’t contributing. I was the last man on the bench for the Brewers, who weren’t winning, who weren’t competing, who played in a lousy stadium where nobody came. I had almost no connection with my teammates. I mean, I liked them, but my head was somewhere else. I was wishing I’d stayed with the White Sox, or was back in Anaheim, or on my nameless boat on Lake Michigan, anywhere but in Milwaukee. I didn’t care how much money I was making, it wasn’t worth this bottomless hurt. I couldn’t endure it again.

  It was my job, so I took the ball one last time in the ninth inning of a game at decrepit Milwaukee County Stadium. We were losing, 4–0. This was the very definition of mop-up duty. I pitched to nine batters, gave up three runs, and got off the mound by striking out Jim Poole, a relief pitcher who’d bat .125 over eleven seasons, with the last cutter I ever threw.

  By then, retirement had been coming for a while. I walked off the field after that last game embarrassed and frustrated. Milwaukee was such a strange experience. Sal Bando, the general manager, was terrific and so was Phil Garner, the manager. But it was disheartening to play for a team that didn’t really have a chance at winning, worse to be among the reasons for it. About halfway through the season I was taken out of the rotation and assigned to the bullpen, so it was obvious they had no plans for me, and I really never enjoyed relieving. In the final month, I sensed it was my last go-around, and lingered especially one afternoon on the field of my youth, old Tiger Stadium in Detroit. I took one final, long look around. I tried to smell it and taste it. My trips as a kid to the old ballpark on Michigan Avenue had helped cement my aspirations. They’d become real there.

  I’d been to the lake over the All-Star break. The Brewers would open the second half in Milwaukee against the Royals. I didn’t want to go back. I wanted to stay with Dana and Maddy. But, I trudged away and put my uniform back on and tried to pitch when I knew I couldn’t. Dana and I had so many late-night talks; I was frustrated and fearful that regular life (whatever that was) seemed so appealing.

  So I walked off the field, hung around through the bottom of the ninth and waited for the writers to clear out of Garner’s office. I went in, closed the door, and told him I was willing to take my release if it made things better for the club. Not surprisingly he thought it would.

  A couple days later the team went off to Florida—the bus that would take it to the airport idled nearby—and I went the other direction, to California, where Dana and Maddy were, where the rest of my life was. I rolled my suitcase through the concrete corridors of County Stadium, through the stray cups and wrappers of the last baseball game I’d play, searching for a pay phone to call Dana and let her know the flight I’d be on. I was alone. A cab was waiting outside. As difficult as it was to go willingly, I did. The pervasive cloud of disappointment began to lift. Just to be physically away from the team, the game, felt like freedom. Strange, bittersweet, frightening freedom.

  As the days put distance between me and my decision, I found contentment. I’d had long talks with my dad and with close friends such as Kirk McCaskill. They knew my pain. They felt the time had come, too. Once, I’d left the game believing I’d beaten myself, that my failures had been self-inflicted, that maybe I hadn’t given enough of myself to become great. Not this time. The hitters said it was time. My body and mind agreed. I wouldn’t ever be good enough again. I could have told Harvey that now.

  Boras, meantime, knew I was in turmoil. He’d flown to Miami and waited at the team hotel there, thinking I’d be on the plane. He was going to convince me to keep at it, to learn to become a reliever. He was disappointed.

  I’d have second thoughts. A little pang here or there. Maybe I should have hung in there longer. I’d seen plenty of players hanging on because they needed the paycheck or had nowhere else to go. I didn’t admire them. I still loved baseball, of course, but my love for my place in it was gone. To push onward seemed motivated by money, or desperation, neither of which seemed honest. I’d made enough money. I thought I’d done enough hanging on. I thought I could be happy. So, at thirty-one, I moved on with life. I was frightened, but I also felt blessed that the game had given me such a great head start.

 
Like my mom said, every step, every new level, was supposed to have been a gift. And it was. You know, maybe I’d go throw a ball off the bricks in Flint again. Maybe that’s where all of this was to end.

  CHAPTER 18

  As I gathered my thoughts and composure in the dugout one final time, my breath came in jagged wisps.

  I laid my jacket on the bench, stacked the eighth and final cup with the others, took comfort in the process, and had a fleeting recollection of another time like it. Five years before, there was a ninth inning in Seoul, South Korea, an Olympic gold medal waiting beyond three more outs. The ballpark was just that loud and I was just that nervous, just that excited.

  I’d been through it, thrown strikes, finished it in a pile of teammates. Maybe I could get there again. Maybe we could.

  Still, stooping to pick up the baseball on the mound, I was haunted by a familiar thought: With my heart hammering like this, how was I going to throw a single pitch, let alone get a big-league hitter out?

  I found Nokes and threw a warm-up pitch. A few more. I forced a deep breath. My chest felt heavy, but I was okay, not at all fatigued, and the ball was behaving, leaving my hand smoothly. This is it, I thought. Trust, I thought. Let’s throw a strike. Let’s throw a no-hitter.

  Kenny Lofton stood in from the left side. Nokes, still on our plan, wanted a slider. I threw it with confidence, toward the middle of the plate, believing the break would carry it away from Lofton’s bat barrel. All that happened, except Lofton turned, slid his left hand up the bat and jabbed at the pitch. More than a tenth of his hits that season were bunt hits. And yet in that moment I’d not given the bunt a single thought. I’m not sure anyone had. I wasn’t ready for it. No one was. The ball skittered down the third-base line, foul.

  The crowd booed. Lofton grimaced. Wade Boggs moved in a few steps from third, Don Mattingly crept in from first base. This was Lofton’s game, granted. And of course his first thought was to win the ballgame. We were ahead only 4–0. Breaking up a no-hitter in the final couple innings with a bunt, however, is considered bad form. I wasn’t sure about that, but I was sure I would have hated to lose eight innings’ worth of no-hitter on a thirty-five-foot hit. Also, Lofton generally killed me; he certainly didn’t need to bunt to get on base.

  Nokes said nothing to Lofton directly. He didn’t have to. He shouted out to Boggs and Mattingly to keep an eye on that, saying it in a tone like, Can you believe this guy? By then I was relieved I’d thrown a slider instead of a fastball, which Lofton might have timed better, and relieved the ball had spun foul, and relieved to be still pitching for a no-hitter.

  I took another ball from Nokes, forced another long breath. We were a single pitch into the ninth inning, and already we’d had a defiant play, a near miss, a gust of anger, and a do-over resolution. Man, I thought, this is fun, and excruciating. So, we reset. Three outs suddenly seemed a long way away. Nokes settled back in behind the plate, Boggs and Mattingly leaned a little forward, the fans stirred again loudly, Lee Smith resumed warming in the bullpen, Buck Showalter and Tony Cloninger recrossed their arms in the dugout, the bunt no longer a near miss or an emotional flare-up but a strike. Strike one.

  Believing Lofton wouldn’t try that again, Nokes wanted a cutter. Lofton didn’t try it again. Instead, he took strike two on the outside corner. Now we’d eliminated the bunt entirely. We went to the slider on 0 and 2, sweeping it away, and just as I had on Thome, I went to a three-quarter arm slot, figuring there was no reason to hold anything back. It ran well off the plate and Lofton held his swing. So we went back to the cutter, Lofton swung, and for the second time in the at-bat I believed the no-hitter was probably gone. The ball bounded over my head and up the middle toward second base. I gave a little jump, swiped at the air, but had no chance. I turned, half expecting to see the ball rolling into center field.

  Instead, I saw Mike Gallego swooping in from the right. I’d worked Lofton away and Gallego had played him up the middle. Like Boggs earlier, and Velarde earlier, and Gallego himself earlier, we were in the right place again. He took the ball on two hops on his backhand side, threw across his body on the run and the ball beat Lofton to the bag by a half-step.

  The ballpark shook like it was full. I tried to pull one long, calm breath, and it came as if filtered by the noise and anticipation. So much for that. I’d settle for a strike to Felix Fermin. Fortunately, I was still throwing off-speed pitches in the strike zone, got a called first strike, and got to 2 and 2 before leaving a curveball over the plate. Fermin, who would go on to hit four home runs in more than 5,500 professional plate appearances, crushed it to left-center field. Thankfully to left-center field, where the ballpark goes on forever.

  As the game had progressed through the middle innings, Dana, who arrived by cab well before the first pitch, had wondered where all her friends had gone. She’d sit with some of the other wives and girlfriends—Pat Kelly’s wife, Rebecca; Danny Tartabull’s wife, Kelly; Wade Boggs’s wife, Debbie; and Scott Kamieniecki’s wife, Rita, were often at the games, and they’d be clustered together on the field level, twenty rows up and just to the left of home plate. They had a good time.

  She’d always just wanted something good to happen, knowing how hard I’d take the alternative. She dared not hope for anything like this, only for a good game and a win, then maybe some contentment.

  By this ninth inning, Dana was alone. None of the other wives wanted to be the one who said something to jinx the no-hitter, so one by one they’d gone off to the restroom or for a soda and never come back. Dana’s brother had played some college baseball, so she’d grown up with the game and its etiquette. She’d also known the disappointment of having Bo Jackson break up my last shot at it, so she sat on the edge of her box seat and didn’t eat, didn’t drink, and barely moved, as desperately as she too needed to run to the restroom. She also knew enough about the game to think Fermin had gotten an awful lot of that curveball. In fact, she thought it was a home run. Me? I was thinking double. There was a groan from the crowd. That ball, everyone thought, was going to get down.

  Along came Bernie Williams. Running hard from straightaway center field, Bernie, a middle-distance sprinter in his youth in Puerto Rico, appeared to be in mid-440. With his right hand extended behind him feeling for the fence, he caught the ball coasting onto the warning track. Fermin, robbed by Gallego five innings before, had lost another hit.

  One more out.

  The place was going crazy. Really crazy. So was my head, my heart. Thirty-seven years before, Don Larsen had thrown a perfect game in this very ballpark, from this very spot, in the World Series. Bob Feller threw a no-hitter here for the Indians. Allie Reynolds had a no-hitter. A decade ago, another lefty, Dave Righetti, threw his no-hitter here, won 4–0, then had sweetly and memorably laid his head on the shoulder of his catcher, Butch Wynegar.

  I knew the feeling. These are not solo flights.

  Carlos Baerga stood in, the switch-hitter still batting left, still defending against the cutter. Gene Michael, the Yankees GM who’d traded for me, stood up in his box behind home plate, no longer able to sit still. Willie Randolph sat to his right. Brian Cashman stood to his left. From the television booth, the voices of Dewayne Staats and Tony Kubek tightened. Dana gripped the bottom of her chair.

  My brother, Chad, twisted the volume knob on the radio of Mom’s Honda Accord, straining to hear the play-by-play above the ambient crowd noise. He was in Harbor Springs, Michigan, in the driveway of my parents’ condominium, the car key turned to accessory. One of his college friends was in the passenger seat, another in the backseat. A family acquaintance had called the condo from Flint in the seventh inning, asking if they’d heard what was happening that afternoon at Yankee Stadium, and Chad and his buddies had dashed into the driveway in search of a radio.

  With each of the last nine outs, he’d yell to Dad. Eight more! Seven more! Finally, one more!

  In the stands, the middle-inning lines at the pay phones—people calling their dads
and sons and friends to turn on the TV—had thinned to nothing.

  Behind me, Mattingly worked the dirt at first base with his spikes, scraping at it like a hockey goalie would the ice in front of his net. The energetic Gallego bounced on the balls of his feet near second base. Boggs, whose defensive plays had helped get me here, pounded his glove expectantly at third. At shortstop, Velarde shook his legs. They felt heavy, a little sluggish. The grind of the game, day game after a night game, had settled in his thighs. Don’t hit it to me, he thought.

  They’d only just gotten over the Fermin scare when I threw the first pitch to Baerga, the next-to-last pitch of my afternoon, a slider. He couldn’t have seen many breaking balls from the left side all year. He took it for a strike, then gestured with his left hand like the pitch was too high. From there, the up-and-in slider, we went down-and-away with the same pitch. Baerga pounded it toward shortstop and Velarde. He rolled forward off those tired legs and gathered up the ball. Hit him in the chest, I thought from memory. Hit him in the chest. Velarde threw to first, hard and true.

  At first base, Mattingly caught the baseball with a hard thwack and raised his arms.

  “He did it!” Staats cried from the booth.

  The crowd, all those people, rejoiced. Dana stood among them. Michael, his tie loosened, Randolph, and Cashman exchanged handshakes and fist pumps.

  Cloninger and Showalter jumped to their feet, mindful of the low dugout ceiling, grinning at each other.

  Nokes, who’d backed up first base on the throw from Velarde, rushed in from my left, his hands in the air. Boggs charged in from behind.

  All I could think of was, Yeah, baby! Yeah, baby!

  So I yelled it over and over. I yelled it to Nokes and toward the stands and into the gray sky. I yelled it so Dana could hear it twenty rows up, so my mom and dad would hear it in Michigan, so the Angels would hear it in Anaheim. I’d been practicing that last pitch, that last out, since my dad first knelt in the backyard, since I’d peppered that brick wall in Flint.