Beyond Belief (24 page)
A father will tell me about his son while I’m signing autographs. A mother will wait outside the players’ parking lot to tell me about her daughter. They know where I’ve been. They remind me that this isn’t really about baseball.
A man called to me during spring training and told me his son was a meth addict who loved baseball. A story about me in
USA Today
had caught the father’s attention, and he gave it to his son and told him to read it. When he finished, his son said, “I’m going to give it a try. If he can do it, so can I.”
It had been two weeks since his son read the article, the father said, but it had been a good two weeks. His smile could have lit up the ballpark, and the tears in his eyes caused me to reach up over the railing and pat him on the back.
“Tell your son I said, ‘Stay strong,’ ” I told him.
It became official the weekend before Opening Day: I made the team as the fourth outfielder. I wouldn’t say it was anticlimactic, but it didn’t carry the same power and emotion as the day Andrew Friedman called to tell me I’d been reinstated. The truth was, I hit .403 during spring training and was one of the feel-good stories in baseball. Everybody, including me, might have been surprised that I found myself in this position, but after six weeks of spring training nobody was surprised I broke camp as a major-league ballplayer.
As we flew to Cincinnati for the opener against the Cubs, though, I had some time to think about these five words:
Josh Hamilton, major-league ballplayer.
It sounds both completely natural and utterly unbelievable. To the folks back home in Raleigh, who saw me play from the time I was six, this was predestined, a simple result of the world’s natural order.
Josh Hamilton, major-league ballplayer?
There was never any question in the minds of the parents who feared for their children’s safety, or in the minds of the scouts who watched me at Athens Drive High School, or in the minds of my minor-league teammates with the Princeton Devil Rays or the Charleston RiverDogs.
But ask the people who populated my other life and they’ll tell you
Josh Hamilton, major-league ballplayer
must be some kind of mistake.
The doctors in the emergency rooms who counted my heartbeat through my shirt as they treated me after I ingested near-overdose levels of cocaine — they’ll tell you the idea of this man someday performing at the highest level of his sport never occurred to them. They were simply trying to save my life before shrugging and telling my parents there was really nothing they could do if their son was determined to kill himself.
And the guys who lived and sold crack out of the trailer. Ask them what they think of the words
Josh Hamilton, major-league ballplayer
and they’ll probably laugh right in your face, tell you to get that shit out of here, man.
With Opening Day the next afternoon, there was very little sleep to be found on the night of April 1, 2007. My mind raced all night, thinking about the twisted, rutted road I’d traveled to this point. I thought this night — the night before my first big-league game — would happen much sooner. Then I thought it would never happen at all.
It felt like I broke everything in my path and then somehow managed to put it all back together. The people who had been with me, my parents and Katie and her parents and my brother and Granny, were still here. They left, and then they came back.
Just like me.
ON THE MORNING of April 2, 2007, Opening Day, Katie and I woke up in our rented condo outside Cincinnati and went about our business as if we couldn’t believe this day had come. To the girls, it was just another day of watching Daddy play baseball, but for us it was almost surreal. In a matter of hours, I would be jogging from the home dugout to the first- base line in a Cincinnati Reds uniform as the public-address announcer introduced me to more than forty-two thousand people.
I didn’t know how the fans would react to me, but I knew I had my own cheering section. My parents, Katie’s parents, Julia and Sierra, Steve Reed — all of them were there, sitting near the Reds’ dugout. I wanted Granny to be there, but her health didn’t allow her to travel. She was home watching it on television. (She bought the “Extra Innings” package the second she found out I made the team.)
My parents got to the ballpark as early as possible, just like old times.
I arrived more than four hours before game time. There was a locker with my name over it, so I wasn’t dreaming this. The minutes seemed like hours as I tried to stay busy and tried not to watch the clock. I got more nervous and more excited with every passing minute.
This was really happening.
There’s not a lot of serious talk during times like this. The clubhouse is a place for bluster and wisecracks more than deep thoughts, but I could feel the eyes on me occasionally as everybody went about their business. This was a big day for everybody, but it was an unreal day for me. I sensed that many of my teammates understood that.
Jeff Conine walked up to me as I was sitting in front of my locker. This was Jeff’s seventeenth Opening Day, and the Reds were his sixth team over those seventeen years. He’d seen just about all there was to see in the big leagues, which made him one of the guys I respected most on the team.
Jeff looked down at me with a knowing smile on his face.
“You excited?”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Oh, yeah.”
Jeff broke into the big leagues with the Kansas City Royals in 1990, on a team with Bo Jackson and George Brett. He told me he remembered when he was in my position, fidgeting and waiting for his first big-league game. Brett and Jackson both took the time to speak to him, and he felt their words were worth repeating in this situation.
“Just remember this: Between the lines, it’s just baseball,” he said. “No matter the level, it’s the same game you’ve been playing your whole life. Everything else is different once you get up here, but they didn’t change the game. If you can keep that straight, you’ll be fine.”
I made the team as the fourth outfielder, and I wasn’t in the lineup on Opening Day. During batting practice I watched the stands fill and my family gather in their seats near the Reds’ dugout. It didn’t take long for me to discover how I would be received by the hometown fans. The fans in Cincinnati love baseball and love the Reds, and from the moment the fans entered the stadium I was greeted with cheers and autograph requests from everyone from elderly women to little boys in their Reds caps.
I had to prepare myself for the pregame introductions, because I knew it was going to be difficult to keep a lid on my emotions. They introduced the nonstarters first, and as it got closer to my turn I could feel my heart beating faster and faster. When I reached the steps of the dugout, waiting for my name to be called, I had to swallow hard to keep from crying tears of joy. By that point, I didn’t want to try to speak. I don’t think it would have worked.
And when they introduced me — “No. 33, outfielder Josh Hamilton” — I jogged to the third-base line. I tried to be cool, but the noise blew me away. By the time I finished shaking hands with my teammates and faced the crowd, everybody was standing. The cheers came down on me like a waterfall, and I stood there with a big silly grin on my face.
I looked up into the stands, at the people who stayed by my side, and I nodded my appreciation. Katie and my parents and her parents were all crying. I saw Sierra and Julia, and the looks on their faces made me proud. On the outside, I looked like I was together. I plastered a smile on my face and felt the burning in my throat as I held back the tears. I was a big-leaguer, and I had to act like one. Inside, though, was a different story: Deep down, I was a big puddle.
There was just no way to express the gratitude I felt as I took the field that day. Everywhere I looked I saw a reminder of God’s glory. The fans in the stands, with their big-hearted acceptance of me. My family, with their loyalty and forgiveness. Myself, with the gifts He wouldn’t allow me to squander, no matter how hard I tried.
It was here. About four years late, at the end of a windy, rocky road, I made it. And at that moment, despite everything that had happened to me, I wouldn’t have traded it for anything in the world. I wouldn’t have traded it for four more years in the big leagues or a few million more dollars or anything else you could think of.
Everything that had happened was leading to this moment. It couldn’t have happened any other way.
In the bottom of the eighth inning, Jerry Narron told me to get ready to pinch-hit. I bounced over to the bat rack and felt my heartbeat quicken and the butterflies start a riot in my stomach.
Our pitcher, Kirk Saarloos, was coming up that inning, and Narron called on me to bat for him. I walked to the on-deck circle on a cloud, trying and failing to think about what I needed to do when I got into the batter’s box.
As I left the dugout, the cheering started and didn’t stop. I looked around, trying to be nonchalant, and was shocked to see some of the fans start to stand. Then more stood, and more.
It felt like an electrical current was running through my body. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, and the noise level made the pregame introduction sound like someone whispering in church.
Nearly everyone was standing when Cubs manager Lou Piniella — the man who had listened to my lies three years ago and patiently told me to get my life straight — started out of the dugout to make a pitching change. He removed right- hander Michael Wuertz and called for lefty Will Ohman.
I stood in the on-deck circle and wondered if this was really me. I was swinging a bat and loosening up, but my mind was far away. This was the moment nobody thought would ever arrive, and I looked around and thanked God for the opportunity. Nothing could compare to this moment, ever, and I realized this was the way things had to be. No bemoaning the mistakes I’d made or the years I’d lost. This was reality. This was fate. This was the way God meant for it to be, and I was merely His instrument.
The noise died some as Ohman took his warmup pitches, but it picked up again when I was announced. By the time I got into the batter’s box, it was deafening. I smiled and looked around in amazement, nearly forgetting why I was there.
I couldn’t see them, but everyone in my family was crying. As I dug into the batter’s box and took a couple of practice swings, trying to calm my heart and my nerves, they kept standing and cheering.
Cubs catcher Michael Barrett, crouching behind the plate, looked up at me through the bars of his mask and said, “You deserve it, Josh. Take it all in, brother. I’m happy for you.”
Now, the hard part. The crowd’s noise died down and the work began. I was so excited and my mind was so scattered I didn’t think there was a chance I was going to have much of an at bat.
But then Ohman threw, and I hit the ball. I wanted to jump up and down and throw my hands into the air. I was so pumped up, so filled with emotion, that I surprised myself by even being able to see the ball, let alone make contact and hit it pretty hard. I watched the ball fly over the shortstop’s head toward the left fielder, and I thought I had a flare single.
That might have happened in the movie version, but in real life — and in the big leagues — the ball was caught by Cubs’ left fielder, Matt Murton, who ran in a long way and made a rolling catch at his ankles.
I jogged back to the dugout, and the cheering started again. The people stood again, more than forty-two thousand of them. This was the third standing ovation I received in about ten minutes, and I was once again amazed at the outpouring of support. When I reached the dugout, several of my teammates greeted me. Ken Griffey Jr., gave me a playful one-armed hug around the neck. How cool is that?
I am an addict. That didn’t change when I made it to the big leagues. And because I am an addict, I have to go about my business differently. When we’re at home, the variables are a little easier to control, especially when Katie and the girls are with me. On the road, however, with so much idle time in new cities, I needed a plan to keep myself focused.
Johnny handled my meal money, and he was always there for me at any hour of the day. We traveled to and from the ballparks together, whether it was walking or by taxi. We ate most meals and often did our daily devotionals together. He was an insurance policy for the team, as well as someone who could run interference for me if something came up that I didn’t know how to handle.
Being a rookie is difficult enough, but being a different kind of rookie made it that much harder. I am not a confrontational person by nature, and rookies are supposed to be subservient in the baseball culture, but there were times when the baseball culture and my well-being came into conflict.
For one thing, there’s a certain amount of rookie hazing that goes on in the big leagues. Rookie relief pitchers have to carry a bag with sunflower seeds and chewing tobacco and other staples for the guys in the bullpen. Often that bag is as embarrassing as possible — a pink Barbie backpack or something along those lines.
Most of the traditions are meant to be in good fun, and I played along just fine. But one rookie duty is to carry the beer on road trips. Alcohol is a big part of the culture in baseball, although recent events — especially the tragedy of pitcher Josh Hancock’s death in St. Louis — have forced baseball to take a closer look at the intelligence of letting players use the clubhouse as a bar after games.
With the Reds, one of the rookies’ jobs was to carry a bag of beer from the clubhouse to the bus when we left on a road trip, and then to carry it from the bus to the charter plane once we reached the airport.
I didn’t have a moral objection; everyone’s an adult and whoever wants to drink a beer on the plane should be able to do it. But before the first road trip of my rookie season, I declined when I was asked — or, rather, told — to carry the beer by one of the veterans.
When I unexpectedly found myself in the big leagues, one of my main goals was to be one of the guys. I wanted to fit in, to laugh and joke and hang out with my teammates the way I did in high school and in my first two years in the minors. But situations arose that pointed out an important fact: I was different. Part of my sobriety is to acknowledge the situations where I
have
to be different, and not let myself be drawn into uncomfortable positions just to fit in.