Inside Baseball: The Best of Tom Verducci (40 page)

“Our first winner is …” Wells says, pausing for dramatic effect. “Reed Johnson.” There is applause. “Cat?”

“And the other spot goes to …” Catalanotto says, “Johnny Mac. Sorry, Russ.”

Adams stalks off indignantly, feigned or not.

“You lost points,” Hudson shouts, “because you had spelling mistakes and wrote on a raggedy ol’ piece of paper.”

Who knew neatness counts in the big leagues? Left unmentioned is the power of tenure. Adams may be Ricciardi’s first No. 1 pick and Hudson’s double play partner, but he has only 31 days of service time.

More live BP, and Rosario and his 94-mph heater again. I get two swings, both on fastballs. I foul one off into the top of the cage. The other I hit hard toward where a second baseman would normally play.

“Hit and run, that’s a base hit,” Barnett says. Mr. Sunshine. I love the guy.

My throwing arm feels good, and I can run with everyone just fine. But fatigue in my left shoulder and right quadriceps from four long days of hitting has undermined whatever mechanics I have. I am, however, still far short of the threshold I established to require even stepping into Poulis’s training room: displaced fractures or profuse bleeding.

LAST DAY. Game day. Hitters pack the batting cages every morning as early as two hours before practice officially begins. But today, as I arrive for soft-toss at 8 a.m. before the 9:30 workout, there are no lines for the first time.

“Fifth day,” Barnett explains. “Happens every year. Fatigue begins to set in, and guys know when to back off.”

Barnett and Rettenmund have improved my swing. I’m exerting less effort but getting better results. Barnett notes that with my downward path and high finish, I’ve even begun to impart some backspin to the ball, which generates carry.

“Your swing is good,” Rettenmund says. “Your timing is terrible.”

He’s
no Mr. Sunshine. By timing, Rettenmund means the synchronicity of body parts, especially the two-part harmony that must exist between the lower body and the hands. “If you have to think about what your hands are doing,” Rettenmund says, “it’s too late. The ball is past you.”

The team is divided evenly for the six-inning intrasquad game. Coach Ernie Whitt tells me I will be replacing Catalanotto in leftfield after three innings. Gibbons, perhaps extending the aggressive theme of camp a mite too far, tells me, “If you get on, go ahead and take a bag.”

The dugout and field are largely quiet. There are one-on-one conversations in the dugout after some at bats, in which every pitch gets a full-blown autopsy. But chatter of the Little League variety is essentially nonexistent, except for one master practitioner: Hudson, whose lips cease flapping only when he sleeps, or so rumor has it. Hudson is to chatter what the machine gun is to ammunition. Even in the middle of a play, when Menechino stabs a hot bouncer at third base and prepares to throw to first, Hudson yells, “Attawaytogo, Mini-Me!”

Our side, the home team, is winning 2–0 when I replace Catalanotto in leftfield in the fourth. Hinske, the finicky hitter, does launch a fly ball in my direction, but it lands far foul. No other projectiles come anywhere near me for my three innings.

McDonald begins our turn at bat in the fifth with a triple, which thrills me because I am next. The infielders play in, which means they can cover less ground against me.

As I step in to hit, a fan behind the backstop says to no one in particular, “Who’s this guy? I don’t have a number 2 on my roster.”

“He’s a new guy,” says Ricciardi, who is seated with Gibbons behind the backstop. “We just signed him.”

The pitcher is Chad Gaudin, 21, a freckle-faced, 165-pound righthander from Louisiana who somehow conceals a 94-mph fastball and hellacious slider beneath his Huck Finn looks. Gaudin (pronounced GO-dan) reached the big leagues with Tampa Bay in 2003 just two years removed from high school. He threw a perfect game in the minors that year and set an organizational record with a 1.81 ERA. After Gaudin finished with a 4.85 ERA out of the Devil Rays’ bullpen last year, Ricciardi traded Kevin Cash, a 27-year-old catcher, to add Gaudin’s live arm to his bullpen. Cash left behind some of his bats. The black maple one that I have in my hands, still intact after numerous turns in the cage, is one of them.

What I don’t know is that among AL pitchers who faced at least 200 batters last year, only 12 hit batters more frequently than Gaudin (correction: pronounced go-DOWN). It may be a fool’s naiveté, but I don’t even think about the possibility of getting hit.

During one of our tracking sessions in the cage, I had asked Johnson if he ever dwelled on the possibility of getting struck by a pitch. He told me, “There is no fear factor as a hitter. You’re so locked in on hitting that you don’t allow that thought. You wouldn’t be here if you did. When I’m going good is when I usually get hit. It means I’m staying in there longer.”

I step into the batter’s box, placing my right foot in the hole McDonald scraped inside the back chalk line. I am aware of nothing but Gaudin—not the crowd, not the infield in and, Lord knows, not the blue sky.

This moment is the essence of the game, its molecular core. It is why we love baseball as we love a family member, while the other sports have to manage with our lust, infatuation or uncommitted affection. Either I will win or Gaudin will win, and even the most rudimentary fan will immediately know it. No one will have to wait for the game films. And no teammate can help me.

A baseball game will stage about 80 of these batter versus pitcher matchups, all of which appeal to our American sense of democracy—we must
take turns
at bat—and our thirst for conflict and for quick and clear resolution, the backbone of prime-time television, our real national pastime, as well. Eighty miniversions of
CSI
.

Since sportswriters fall significantly below utility infielders and pitchers in the food chain of big league hitters, I assume Gaudin will attack me with a first-pitch fastball. I have committed to swing at the first pitch since I woke up and ate a bowl of instant oatmeal from the Spread. Gaudin swings his arm down, back, up and through in that familiar, graceful but orthopedically damning circle of a big league pitcher.

Here it comes. It is a fastball and it is a strike. I have prepared for everything about this pitch except one thing: its speed. The baseball jumps on me so incredibly quickly that I am transfixed. The ball has not just outraced my mind, it has fried its circuitry. Synapse shutdown. I cannot swing.

“
Huuuuh!
” bellows the umpire.

I am in a hole, 0 and 1. Worse, I have a slightly gnawing feeling in my stomach that I will never again see a pitch that good.

Now I
must
swing. Here it comes again. Fastball. Inner half. I swing. Just as I do, the ball is gone. Manhole. It drops so unkindly beneath the path of my bat that I can almost hear it laugh.

I am in hitter’s jail, 0 and 2, and Gaudin is not bound by the Geneva Convention. He can do whatever he wants with me—spin one, waste one, shave my whiskers. This much I know: If it is within the 34698 ZIP code, I am swinging. You do not leave eagle putts short, you do not miss the birth of your children, and you do not go down looking in your only major league at bat.

Here it comes again. Fastball. Up. Farther in. I swing.

Contact!

Wait. What? My bat. Weightless. Gone.

I look in my hands. Only about eight inches of maple remain. The other 26 inches are gone to I-don’t-know-where. Sawed in half. The palm of my right hand is vibrating like a tuning fork and will for the next 30 minutes.

The baseball? I look up. There it is. A pop-up toward first base. I run. I see Hinske, 235 pounds of Wisconsin beef, in the base line tracking it. Panic is a rapid transit system to the brain, and I have time to imagine a collision, the pain and the ignominy of a sportswriter blowing out the knee of the starting first baseman. But Hinske catches it uneventfully. I am out. Though the bat died in vain, there is a measure of victory to be extracted from merely making contact.

Huckaby, hitting next, strikes out, but Shea Hillenbrand picks up both of us with a single to drive in McDonald. We win 3–0.

In the locker room I run into Gaudin, towel around his waist, headed for the shower.

“You know what?” he says. “I didn’t even know it was you up there until after the at bat. I was just so locked in on trying to get an out with the man on third. I threw that two-seamer down [on the second pitch] and figured I’d come back up for a different look. Change your eye level. Then after the out, I looked over and thought, Man, that was Verducci. You did real good.”

I head to the weight room, where Butterfield finds me.

“Skip wants to see you in his office,” he says.

“Now?”

“Right now.”

I walk into Gibbons’s office. Ricciardi and his assistant, Tim McCleary, flank Gibbons’s desk.

“Close the door,” Gibbons says. “Have a seat.

“This is one part of the job that’s never easy. You gave a great effort out there. We appreciate it, but … it’s a good thing you have another job. We’ve got your unconditional release papers right there. Sign both copies.”

That’s it. It is officially over. I walk back to my locker, toss my copy of the release onto the top shelf and plop down on my chair. And suddenly I see, tucked behind the miraculously laundered and hung undergarments, my maple bat in its two-piece eternal repose. And I have to smile. For it is then that I know for certain that I have summoned the game’s splendor in all its fullness.

Postscript: The most reader feedback I ever received was for the Red Sox Sportsmen of the Year story—until this one. I think it resonated not just with fans who were devoted to one team, but with anyone who ever dreamed of wearing a big league uniform or wondered what it was like to face a 95 mph fastball, which pretty much covers the general population of baseball fans.

I had wanted to write about baseball this way—up close—for years, inspired by curiosity, a brilliant 1973 essay by poet (and cameo Pittsburgh Pirate) Donald Hall and a longstanding love for playing the game. I chose the Blue Jays because I wanted a low-profile team on which my presence would not become a media event. I could not have picked a better ballclub. The Jays made this story possible by granting me full access and treating me as one of their own.

An unexpected bonus—which I didn’t learn about until the day the issue printed—was becoming the first SI writer to appear on the magazine’s cover. Cover or no cover, the experience was more than I ever could have hoped for. It made me think of a 19th-century saying, often associated with the Gold Rush: “I have seen the elephant,” which was a way of saying you had been somewhere most others had not, and had probably endured significant tribulations along the way. I came away from the experience with a distinct feeling that I was a little wiser than I’d been, certainly more privileged.