16
NUMBERS MEAN VERY LITTLE to me. Much as I’d like to blame it on Mrs. Tejada, my old math teacher, I can’t. It is just the way I am. I play a sport that is infatuated with records and milestones, that churns out enough numerical nuggets to fill a barge. Me, I don’t keep track of such things, and never have. I would be a terrible guy to have as your fantasy advisor. You know when I know about a milestone? When somebody tells me about it.
In early June 2006, I have a five-pitch, three-out save in Fenway (no, they didn’t cheer), which was No. 391 for my career, moving me past Dennis Eckersley into fourth place on the all-time list.
About six weeks later, I throw two scoreless innings at Yankee Stadium against the White Sox for save No. 400. On September 15, 2008, also against the White Sox at home, I retire A. J. Pierzynski on a tapper in front of the plate, saving a game for Phil Coke—and, with save No. 479, passing Lee Smith for second on the all-time list.
If Jason Zillo, the Yankees’ director of media relations, doesn’t clue me in, or a reporter doesn’t ask me about it, it slips right by. It’s different when I pass Trevor Hoffman’s 601 saves, because it’s a big topic all over the media, but otherwise, just open the bullpen door, cue up “Sandman,” and tell me where I stand in the history department later.
What these milestones mean to me could not be simpler: I am doing my job—and we are winning a lot of ball games.
I hear stories over the years about closers—some big-name closers—who refuse to go into the game if it is not a save situation.
Sorry, Skip, I can’t get loose, they might say.
Or:
I don’t think I can give you anything today.
In other words, If it’s not helping my bottom line, I am not taking the ball.
Their rationale, I guess, is that they get paid based on saves, so why would they want to take on duties that are not going to get them paid?
If I were a pitching coach or manager and I had someone with that attitude, I’d try to get rid of the guy faster than Brett Gardner can get to first. Why have somebody on the team who doesn’t care about the team? If you are that concerned with yourself and your money, maybe you should go play tennis or golf.
Early in September 2007, we are in a pennant and wild-card race and we have an eight-run lead against the Mariners—not a save opportunity—and Mr. T brings me in to get the final three outs. In the final moments of our collapse and the Game 7 defeat to the Red Sox in the 2004 ALCS, Mr. T calls for me to get the final out of a 10–3 game that is one of the sorriest nights in all of Yankee history.
You know what I am thinking?
My manager wants me to pitch, I pitch. That’s it.
I can’t imagine not taking the ball, ever.
So, my numbers? Unless you are talking about my team’s numbers or Numbers, the book in the Old Testament (The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make His face shine upon you and be gracious to you; the Lord turn His face toward you and give you peace), I will leave them to others, and let them be.
From start to finish in 2006, we put up numbers as a team to make your calculator smoke. We score 930 runs for the season, 60 more than the next closest team. We hit .285 as a team and clobber 210 home runs, and with a lineup that includes names such as Rodriguez, Jeter, Sheffield, Damon, Abreu, Cano, Williams, Giambi, Matsui, and Posada, it’s a wonder we don’t score ten runs a game.
We finish with 97 victories and end the regular season at home before the usual 50,000 fans (we set an American League record by drawing 4.25 million fans), and with a new manager, Bernie Williams. Bernie is playing what turns out to be his final regular-season game with the Yankees, and with the division safely clinched, Mr. T continues his tradition of letting a player manage the final game if nothing is at stake. This year, he decides it is Bernie’s turn.
For a reticent musician, Bernie is a managerial maestro. Derek is battling the Twins’ Joe Mauer for the batting title, and when Derek singles in the first, he is only half a point behind. But Mauer winds up getting two hits, and when it’s clear Derek can’t catch him, Bernie sends a minor league call-up, Andy Cannizaro, No. 63, out to replace Derek in the top of the ninth. Derek points to his chest, as if to say, Me? and leaves to a huge ovation. Later, in the ninth, Bernie pinch-hits himself for DH Miguel Cairo and doubles to right center. The first-base coach, Tony Pena, makes sure to retrieve the ball—it turns out to be Bernie’s 2,336th and final hit—and tosses it into the dugout, where Jorge grabs it, looks at Bernie on second, and pretends to heave the ball into the stands.
Bernie blows the game by bringing in Kyle Farnsworth, who gives up a two-run homer in the ninth to Adam Lind of the Blue Jays, and then, in his postgame press conference, conducted in Mr. T’s chair, Bernie announces that George Steinbrenner has fired him.
It’s all good fun, and we are upbeat going into the division series against the Tigers, who lose 31 of their last 50 games but still find a way to climb from 71 victories to 95 in one year. We seem to have stabilized after a crazy year of turnover, even by Yankee standards. We endure so many injuries, every day seems to bring three new guys through the clubhouse door. In the pitching ranks alone, we use twenty-five different guys. It’s hard to keep track of their names. I want to be a good teammate to everybody, but often guys are not around long enough for me to do much more than shake hands with them.
(Excuse me, are you Colter Bean or T. J. Beam?)
Pitching has always been the core of our championship teams, so I am not completely sold on the idea that we can just bludgeon teams out of our way with the bats. But plenty of people do think that, including Al Kaline, the Tigers’ Hall of Fame outfielder, a man who played against Mickey Mantle and the great Yankee teams of the 1950s and early ’60s and goes on record as saying that this Yankee lineup is deeper and better. The big-bat formula works fine to begin the series, as Derek hits a homer over the center-field fence and goes 5 for 5. Giambi homers, Bobby Abreu has four RBIs, and we bang out fourteen hits. I save an 8–4 decision for Chien-Ming Wang, and when Damon clocks a three-run blast off of Justin Verlander early in Game 2, Mussina has a 3–1 lead and I am thinking we are in a very good place.
But the Tigers have the best pitching staff in the majors, and if the old cliché that good pitching stops good hitting seemed like a joke in Game 1, nobody is laughing now. We go 1 for 8 with men in scoring position, and one of the biggest culprits is Alex, who strikes out three times, once with the bases loaded. Alex is already upset that he’s batting sixth instead of cleanup, and I can’t say I understand Mr. T’s thinking there. Alex hit 35 homers and drove in 121 runs batting cleanup, and even though that’s a down year for him and he hasn’t hit at all in the postseason the last two years, do you just bump him from his spot? He was in a great groove going into the playoffs. It’s not my decision, obviously. I don’t know whether Mr. T is looking to take the pressure off Alex or using the demotion to motivate him. Alex is a staggering talent, but sometimes he gets in his own way and makes things much harder for himself than they need to be.
Don’t worry about it, I tell him. You can’t change the lineup. Just go out and hit the way you can and everything will take care of itself. You don’t have to prove anything to anybody. Just play your game.
Alex is a very proud man, though. Appearances are important to him. Being a cleanup hitter is important to him. He hasn’t hit this low in a lineup since his first full year with the Mariners ten years earlier. It weighs on him, I’m certain, and I want to be sure his head is where it needs to be. I talk to Alex a lot—especially when stuff is going on around him (which is often).
Relax, Alex. Not trying to do too much is the best gift you can give yourself, I tell him.
Alex is back in the cleanup spot in Game 3 in Detroit, but it doesn’t change anything. Kenny Rogers, a member of our ’96 championship team, hasn’t beaten a Yankee team in a dozen years, but he might as well be Sandy Koufax on this night. He gives up only five hits and strikes out eight and pitches into the eighth, Randy Johnson gets smacked around, and we lose, 6–0.
What is it with these division series? Why do we seem to be in a fight for our playoff lives every year? I haven’t pitched since the first game of the series, and that is not part of our game plan. But I am forever optimistic. All we have to do is win a game. That’s it. We win Saturday, and then we have a deciding Game 5 at home, with our best starter, Wang, on the hill. We put up one good at-bat, then another. We throw one good pitch, then another. We keep battling. That is the championship recipe. You fully embrace each moment, and winning all the little battles allows you to win the greater one.
The Tigers do these things superbly, and the Yankees? Not so much. With our season on the line and with Alex now hitting in the eight hole, we are as flat as a boat deck. Alex now looks so completely lost I don’t blame Mr. T for batting him there at all. I might have just sat him down. Our team is on the brink, and we have to put players out there who can help us win. As great as he is, Alex doesn’t look as if he can help us win right now. Jeremy Bonderman, the Tigers’ hard-throwing starter, pitches a perfect game through five. Our starter, Jaret Wright, gets reached for two homers to fall behind, 3–0, in the second, then gives up an unearned run in the fourth after Alex makes an error. The lead grows to 8–0, and we only get to 8–3 because Jorge, who hits .500 for the series, hits a two-run homer with two outs in the ninth off of reliever Jamie Walker.
The Yankee highlights are otherwise nonexistent. Alex goes 0 for 3 and finishes the series with an average of .071 (1 for 14) and no RBIs, and he is far from alone. Sheffield hits .083, and, as a team, we get two hits in our last twenty-one at-bats with runners in scoring position. For years we win with top-notch pitching and a lockdown bullpen, and one clutch hit after another. We don’t have stars all over the field; we just have guys who grind, and win.
Even I can keep track of the numbers in this series. I throw twelve pitches and complete one inning.
The idleness is crushing.
Spring may bring renewal, but as I report to Tampa in 2007 it also brings sadness. Bernie Williams is not in camp, and he won’t be in camp. He wants to return to the Yankees to fulfill a part-time role similar to what he did very well in 2006, for very little money. The Yankees are not interested. They tell Bernie he can come to camp, but only as a minor league invitee, not with a major league deal. It’s contractual semantics, but to Bernie, a four-time world champion who has been a Yankee since 1991, it is a major affront.
They want him to see if he can play his way onto the team, after hitting 22 postseason home runs and those 80 playoff RBIs—and after everything else he has contributed? Bernie says no thanks, and that’s it. There’s no goodbye, no Bernie Williams Day, just a beloved Yankee sent on his way. It’s not my job to tell the Yankees how to run their business. Brian Cashman and those around him make decisions that they believe are in the best interests of the team. I just don’t think that this is the right way to treat Bernie, and I don’t think it’s the right baseball decision for the team. I am going to miss the guitar. I am going to miss No. 51 even more.
It’s what makes the return of No. 46, Andy Pettitte, so impeccably timed.
Andy left as a free agent after the 2003 loss to the Marlins in the World Series, signing with his hometown Houston Astros. Now, four years later, he’s back, and just the sight of him walking in the door brings joy to my heart. Andy isn’t just a man who leaves it all out there every time he pitches; he’s as good a teammate as you could ever find, a devout Christian who is totally forthright and fully accountable, and he shows it at a difficult time, after his name comes up in the Mitchell Report on the use of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball. Most guys in similar circumstances either go silent, swear on the Bible that they are clean, or release some generic apology through their agent. Andy faces it straight on and admits that he took human growth hormone. It takes a ton of courage to do that, and it makes me respect him even more.
Andy brings the same courage with him out to the mound. He is a man who proves over and over again that you can’t scout heart. The 594th pick in the 1990 June free-agent draft, taken in the 22nd round, Andy is a chubby kid out of Deer Park High School in Texas who is projected to do basically nothing. He doesn’t blow people away with his arm or his athleticism. But he winds up winning 256 games in the big leagues and nineteen more in the postseason, pitching some of the biggest games in recent Yankee playoff history.
He is a guy you want on your team, for sure.
It’s no fault of Andy’s, because he pitches superbly, but when he falls to the Blue Jays in late May, we are in an unimaginable spot: last place. Our record is 21–29. We’ve already had ten different starting pitchers, and all sorts of guys are not playing to their level. We are so far behind the Red Sox—fourteen and a half games—that we’re in danger of getting lapped.
We head into Toronto, where a new round of mayhem unfolds, all of it focused, as usual, on Alex Rodriguez. He is photographed with a woman who is not his wife, and it’s plastered on the cover of a tabloid newspaper. I know none of the particulars. I just know media hysteria ensues. In the same weekend we have a 7–5 lead on the Blue Jays in the ninth inning when Jorge hits a pop fly to third. The Jays’ Howie Clark camps under it. Alex is running with two out, and as he passes Clark he shouts, Ha! A startled Clark backs off the ball, thinking the shortstop had called for it, and it drops. We score three more runs and win, 10–5. Later, Blue Jays manager John Gibbons rips Alex for what he considers a bush-league play. Other Blue Jays chime in, too.
There is no doubt that Alex has a knack for drawing attention to himself, and for making his life a whole lot harder than it needs to be.
As a friend, I just want to help him see that. Help him think through the consequences of things. Help him understand that, probably more than any other player in baseball, he needs to exercise discretion or it’s going to blow up on him.
But I also think that people come after him much harder because he is Alex Rodriguez. If Jorge or Derek had yelled at a fielder the way Alex did, I don’t think it would have become nearly as big a deal. You know how many times hitters and base runners have pulled similar stunts to try to distract me? You know what I hear when I go to field a bunt?
Third! one guy yells.
Second! another guy yells.
People are screaming at me from everywhere, trying to confuse me and get me flustered so that I will throw to the wrong base. It doesn’t work, because I keep my focus on what I have to do. If you are listening to what other people are yelling, then you aren’t as professional as you need to be. How is that different from what Alex does in this case?
And what about when infielders pretend to be fielding a throw from an outfielder to trick a runner? Is that okay, even though it’s outright deceit and could even result in a base runner getting injured pulling up at a base to slide?
I thought the whole brouhaha between the A’s pitcher Dallas Braden and Alex was also ridiculous. Braden had a fit a few years back when Alex ran across the mound to return to first base from third after a foul ball. Braden cursed him out and made Alex out to be the most evil person this side of Whitey Bulger.
Running across a mound? Are you serious? You are really going to worry about that, as if it were some kind of holy land? You think I’m going to get upset if you run across the mound after I get an out? You can do whatever you want. You can roll on the mound. You can dance on it. I don’t care. Because I’m going to get right back on it and go back to work, trying to get you.
I get the save in the “Ha!” game and just hope this is the start of a turnaround. It is my first save in almost a month, and only my fourth in a season that has had many more lowlights than highlights. Four weeks into the season, I have an ERA of 10-something, and there is the annual chorus of doubters starting up, suggesting that I have lost it and that my days as a dominant closer are done. The doubters do not include me, so I honestly am not worried. I know how I feel and what my cutter is doing. I know things will come around and I will get sharper. The day I go out there feeling overmatched, or ill-equipped to get guys out, I will be out of there, and I won’t need anybody else to tell me.
The worst moment for me is probably a game at home against the Mariners when we start a rookie pitcher, Matt DeSalvo, who arrives from the minors and pitches a wonderful game in his big league debut, giving up three hits and one run to the Mariners, without striking out even one guy, a seven-inning effort straight out of soft-toss heaven. In the eighth, an ump blows a call when Willie Bloomquist tries to steal second, calling him safe even though Willie is out by the length of a fishing pole, and the Mariners wind up tying the game. In the ninth, I blow the game when Adrian Beltre mashes a misplaced cutter—supposed to be up and in, but it is out over the plate—for a home run, and we lose. The sting is always bad when you lose that way, but for me to shortchange young Matt DeSalvo, who spoke afterward about the “majesty” of the moment when he was about to throw his first big league pitch to Ichiro, really eats at me. The poor kid has nothing to show for his phenomenal debut.
In the clubhouse afterward, I seek him out.
You pitched a great game. I am sorry about the ending, I say.
That’s okay, Mo. It happens. I know you did your best, Matt says.
We head to Fenway for three games, and one of the tougher weekends Alex has probably ever had. He doesn’t know what the fallout will be from the photograph and how he is going to handle it with Cynthia, his wife and the mother of their young daughter, who is going to meet us in Boston.
It is not for me to judge Alex or lecture him on what to do. I am my own man with my own shortcomings. I know that he and Cynthia have a lot of talking to do, and the last thing I would ever do is inject myself into that process. I just always think that the best thing is to be honest and direct. Look inside yourself. Ask the Lord to purify your heart and share His strength with you. Humble yourself and try to set yourself on a better path, a righteous path, and know that the Lord’s forgiveness is boundless.
At the ballpark, to nobody’s surprise, the Fenway fans find great humor in the whole thing, wearing masks with the face of a blond woman and riding Alex unmercifully. With the score tied with two out in the ninth on Sunday night, Alex rips an 0–2 pitch from Jonathan Papelbon into the Red Sox bullpen. He has never had a happier trip around the bases, I guarantee you that. It’s the biggest hit of our season. I get the save. We take two out of three in Fenway. It is something to build on.
A few weeks later, we have a scheduled trip to Colorado. Our oldest son, Mariano Jr., is graduating from middle school. It is our first graduation as a family. I walk into Mr. T’s office.
You got a minute?
Sure, Mo. What’s up?
I know this is a lot to ask, but would you be okay if I didn’t make the Colorado trip so I can attend my son’s graduation? It means so much to me, and to our family.
I can’t recall ever asking Mr. T for a favor before. I’ve definitely never asked out of a road trip. He looks surprised. He pauses for a long while before he answers.
Mo, I would love to accommodate you. I really would. I understand how important it is to you and Clara, and to your son, but it would be really hard for me to do that. It sends the wrong message. It wouldn’t be fair to let you do this and then not extend the same courtesy to others.
I hear him out, and I know that even asking this is putting him in an awkward spot. But for once, I am not my compliant, team-first self. I don’t think Mr. T understands the significance of this to me. I dropped out of school when I was just a little older than my son. My father dropped out even earlier. This day is something that needs to be celebrated properly, in my mind.
I am sorry, but I am going to go whether I have permission or not. It’s very important that I be there, I say.
I can’t stop you from going, Mr. T says, but if it comes to the eighth or ninth inning and we have a lead and we need you and you’re not there, what do I say to people? You tell me what I’m supposed to say. That you are gone without permission? I don’t know what you want me to say, but I can’t tell people I gave you permission when there are twenty-four other guys counting on you. I can’t do that.
Okay, I reply. I need to think about it. I leave his office and talk it over with Clara. I explain the conversation to her, and the more I reflect on it, the more I realize I cannot defy my manager and go to the graduation. It’s just not how I operate. When it comes down to it, I’d feel that I really let everybody down.
Next time I see Mr. T, I let him know I’ve reconsidered.
I will be on the trip to Colorado, I say. It wouldn’t be right not to be with the team.
I explain to my son: I want to be at your graduation more than anything, but the Yankees won’t give me permission to miss the trip. I love you and I’m proud of you, and I wish I could share this moment with you, but it’s not possible for me to be there.
Mariano Jr. is very understanding. The sad truth is that he, Jafet, and Jaziel are very accustomed to my being away and missing occasions and events. Baseball has given our family an awful lot, but the schedule is not very forgiving.
We get swept in Colorado and I don’t even pitch. It’s pretty much how the season is going. Every time I think it’s going to turn around, we backslide again. We manage to get to .500 (43–43) for the All-Star break, so, psychologically speaking, it’s a new season. We forget the mess we made in the first half and start resembling the New York Yankees. In back-to-back games against the Rays, we outscore them, 38–9, pound out 45 hits, and wind up scoring the most runs in the majors again. We go 24–8 out of the break and suddenly are within four games of the Red Sox. A big part of the surge is our new secret weapon out of the bullpen, a hulking kid from Nebraska named Joba Chamberlain, who is twenty-one years old and overpowering the world. Joba throws 99-mile-per-hour fastballs, and his slider is an even better pitch. In his first twelve games, he doesn’t give up an earned run and strikes out way more than a man per inning, pumping his fist after every punch-out. By the end of the regular season, he has 34 strikeouts and 6 walks in 24 innings, and an ERA of 0.38. Of the 19 games in which he has pitched, we’ve won 17 of them. It’s fun to see a kid who has so much belief in himself, attacking from the first pitch to the last. I’m not one to get carried away and anoint someone as a future star after such a short sample of games, because to me that status is only achieved over time, but he’s been the next best thing to unhittable, and it is something to behold.
We’re in the playoffs for the thirteenth straight year, but for the first time in ten years, we are not the AL East champions. As the wild-card team, we open on the road against the Cleveland Indians. Johnny Damon drives a CC Sabathia pitch over the fence to start the game, and then Chien-Ming Wang takes the mound, a steady sinkerballer who won nineteen games for us in each of the last two years. There is no reason not to have a ton of faith in Wang. He has won six of his last seven starts and handled the playoff pressure well the previous two seasons.
Then the game starts, and Wang is all over the place. In the first inning alone, he walks two, hits one, and gives up three singles and three runs. His sinkerball not only isn’t sinking; it is flying all over the park. By the time he leaves in the fifth, his line says nine hits and eight runs, and even though Sabathia is wild and we’re hitting him, it doesn’t matter. We lose, 12–3, and that makes Game 2 a must-have, and we’ve got just the guy we need on the mound: Andy Pettitte. He needs to go deep in the game, and hand the ball to Joba, who will hand the ball to me. It’s worked almost flawlessly from the day Joba arrived.
Andy proves yet again that his competitive makeup ranks with anybody’s. He has base runners on in every inning and gets out every time. In the sixth, Grady Sizemore hits a leadoff triple, and never budges; Andy gets Asdrubal Cabrera on a bouncer back to the mound, then strikes out Travis Hafner and Victor Martinez.
The game moves to the seventh, the only run coming on Melky Cabrera’s homer off of Indians starter Roberto Hernandez in the third. With one out in the bottom of the seventh, Jhonny Peralta doubles and Kenny Lofton walks, and Mr. T calls for Joba, who makes his postseason debut by striking out Franklin Gutierrez and getting Casey Blake on a fly to right.
The kid is amazing and without fear.
It’s still 1–0 as Joba comes out for the eighth and I warm up in the bullpen for the ninth. As Joba prepares to face Sizemore, he begins swatting and waving his arms around on the mound. It is not a stray mosquito or two. It is a swarm of little bugs called midges, and in the heat of an unseasonably warm fall night (it’s 81 degrees when the game starts), they are descending on Joba and his sweat-soaked neck and face by the hundreds, if not thousands. They are covering his neck. They are in his ears. Flying around his mouth and nose and eyes. He keeps flailing and it does no good, and neither does the insect spray Gene Monahan brings out.
The bullpen is completely midge-free. I am not bothered once. Seeing Joba’s reaction, I can’t believe the umpires aren’t stopping the game. They stop it for a torrential rainstorm. Why not stop it for a torrential bug storm? Maybe because the midges aren’t nearly as bad by the dugout, Mr. T doesn’t fully grasp what Joba is going through and doesn’t push the umps to halt play. So it continues, and for the first time since he got to the majors two months before, Joba Chamberlain, strike machine, turns from a smoking-hot sports car into a wild and sputtering jalopy. He walks Sizemore on four pitches—a first in his big league career. He wild-pitches him to second, and two batters later, he wild-pitches him home to tie the game. The poor kid is doing all he can to keep his composure, but with the midges continuing the attack, he hits one guy and walks another, before finally getting Peralta on a slider away to end the inning.
Joba leaves the game. And the midges leave the field as mysteriously as they came.
We have a man on second in the top of the ninth, but Alex strikes out. I get the Indians in order and it goes to extra innings. After I get through a bumpy tenth—I strike out Peralta with the bases loaded—we do nothing in the top of the eleventh, our all-world offense so weak it has produced just two singles since the fourth inning.
When Hafner lines a single with the bases loaded off Luis Vizcaino, the Indians have a 2–1 victory, and we have another serious divisional hole to escape from.
Back in the midge-free Bronx, Mr. T starts forty-four-year-old Roger Clemens, who was lured out of retirement to help stabilize our rotation; but he has battled injuries and inconsistency, and tonight is no different.
Phil Hughes is stellar in relief, Damon and Cano sock big hits, and I save an 8–4 victory. So we need one more to take the series back to Cleveland for a fifth game. It’s Wang’s turn again, and, pitching on three days’ rest, his fortunes do not change, the Indians smacking him around for five hits and four runs in one-plus innings. We fall behind, 6–1, and though Alex homers and Abreu homers, it’s another game where we don’t pitch, or hit, well enough to win.
Our season ends with a 6–4 loss.
When I go into the off-season, I am like a fisherman going out to sea. I’m going to be gone awhile, and I don’t look back. I don’t think about baseball, and I don’t watch baseball. As much as I love the game, if I am not playing in the World Series, I don’t want to watch the World Series. It is no different this year, when the Red Sox are playing the Rockies, but it doesn’t take me long to find out that my friend Alex Rodriguez is back in the news. In the top of the eighth inning of the fourth and final game of the Series, FOX reporter Ken Rosenthal apparently reports that Alex is going to opt out of his contract with the Yankees.
Why now? What are you doing, Alex? Couldn’t you have waited until tomorrow?
Those are my thoughts when I find out about this.
Alex has the right to be a free agent by the terms of his contract. That is completely his right, and he should go for the opt-out if that’s what he thinks is best. But what is the point of doing it during the World Series? Why hijack attention from the game you love? I am no psychologist, and I am not going to pretend that I am. You know by now that I am not one to judge harshly; I try not to judge at all. I don’t know what Alex’s motivation is. Maybe his agent convinces him that this is a great way to kick off a bidding war by showing the world what a big deal Alex Rodriguez is… so big that they interrupt the World Series to talk about his contract situation. Or maybe it’s important for him to feel, well, this important. I don’t know. Controversies may not swarm Alex the way the midges swarmed Joba that night in Cleveland, but sometimes it’s close. I have spoken to him time and again about the beauty and benefit of keeping things simple.
I am hoping and praying that one day he will listen.
It’s November 29, my thirty-eighth birthday, the Series put to bed and another month closer to spring, but I am not in the mood to celebrate. I am in Panama for the funeral and burial of my friend and mentor Chico Heron, who has passed away after a long illness. I’ve known Chico for most of my life, and I loved him. If he hadn’t scouted me and believed in me, I would’ve had no shot at making the big leagues. If he hadn’t taught me the things he taught me, I don’t know where I would be.
Chico was a funny little guy, a man completely about Panamanian baseball. You could be playing on a rock-ribbed sandlot that was miles from everywhere, and you’d look up and Chico would be there. Then you’d be at the biggest stadium in Panama City, and he’d be there, too. Chico loved baseball and loved scouting, and he loved helping guys he believed in. Chico didn’t worry that I was skin and bones and only throwing in the mid-eighties when he scouted me as a pitcher. He saw potential. He saw what I might become—a kid who, with more weight and a lot of work, just might be a legitimate prospect. He recommended me to his boss, Herb Raybourn, and soon enough I was on my way to Tampa.
Even more than his eye for talent, though, Chico had goodness in his soul. He knew the right way to do things. Over and over, he would talk to me about giving everything I had at all times, about being respectful and keeping my focus and persevering through the tough times that are definitely a part of the game and of life.
Trust yourself and believe in yourself, and trust in the Lord, Chico would tell me. When you have that trust, and you are willing to work and work, there’s no telling what you can accomplish.
I listened, and it changed my life.