Beyond Belief (22 page)

This argument was a last-chance argument. I wanted the decision-makers to know that my sobriety was different this time around, that it was a choice made for me and my family, with God’s guidance. My previous attempts at sobriety had been intended to make someone else happy, or to help my chances of getting back into baseball so I could stop being such a disappointment to everybody.

This time, I honestly thought baseball was just the final piece of the puzzle. It was a means to an end, and not the end itself.

For the first time in a long time, I felt hopeful about getting back in the game.

I knew the call would come from the Devil Rays, thumbs up or thumbs down. Now all that was left was to wait by the phone.

I told Katie the call was coming, and I told her I felt good about it. She told me not to get my hopes too high, for fear they’d be dashed and I’d be worse than when I started.

Every day we waited seemed like a week. We were taking Sierra to the pediatrician’s office to get her ears checked one afternoon — June 20, 2006, to be exact — when my cell phone rang. We had just gotten out of the truck to get Sierra out of her car seat when my cell phone rang. I saw the 813 area code come up on the caller ID.

“This is it,” I told Katie.

She didn’t say anything, but she prayed to herself,
Please, God, let this be it.

I took a deep breath, shot Katie a hopeful glance, and answered.

It was Andrew Friedman, the Devil Rays’ general manager.

“Josh, you sitting down?”

“Is it that bad?”

“No, it’s that good.”

He didn’t have to say anything else. I knew exactly what that meant — I was back. Not only was I back, but the commissioner’s office decided if they were going to reinstate me to play independent-league baseball, they might as well allow me to return to the Devil Rays. I was being allowed to report to the Devil Rays’ extended spring training in Tampa, with the idea of returning to the minor leagues at some point before the end of the season.

The biggest chill I’ve ever felt ran through my entire body. Katie knew immediately from the look on my face. I started crying, and I cried and laughed and tried to make sense of it all.

Katie started crying, and in the middle of a pediatrician’s parking lot we stood there and made a scene — crying and laughing and hugging and bouncing around like schoolkids.

One more chance. One more last chance. God had given me new life and presented me with a miracle.

I was back in the game.

I stood there looking at my wife and baby. The tears rolled down my cheeks and lost themselves in my smile.

I was proof that hope is never lost.

A few weeks after my reinstatement, the devil reappeared in my dreams.

It was the same dream. I kept hitting the devil with a bat or a club and he kept bouncing back, rearing up at me with his hideous, cold face. He seemed unbeatable, unstoppable.

Just as I felt my strength wane and my resolve weaken — just as the devil was about to win — I felt a presence by my side. I turned and saw Jesus, fighting beside me, fighting
with
me, and suddenly I was filled with the strength of a thousand men.

We kept fighting, and finally I struck the devil and he did not reappear.

He stayed down.

We had won.

I arrived at extended spring training with the bare minimum of equipment. I had spikes and a glove, but very little else. Before the first day of workouts, my business manager, Steve Reed, called my old friend Carl Crawford of the Devil Rays and arranged to drive over to Tropicana Field to pick up a few of Carl’s bats so I would have my own bats to use during batting practice.

Extended spring training is for guys recovering from injuries, or sometimes young players who need more work than they’ll get on a minor-league team. I don’t know where I fit in — I was, as usual, in my own category — but I was thrilled to be playing baseball for the first time in four long years.

After about a month of twice-daily workouts in Tampa, the Devil Rays assigned me to the Hudson Valley Renegades of the New York–Penn League. The team that represented my first promotion — from Rookie League in Princeton, West Virginia — was now the first stop on my new adventure.

The night I arrived in New York, I drove directly to an empty Dutchess Stadium in the town of Wappingers Falls. I looked out onto that field and remembered playing there as a kid, a lifetime ago. This time, it looked different. It looked new. Before, Hudson Valley was just a stop along the way, two words on the back of my baseball card.

This time, it stood for so much more. This time, it stood for the chance I never thought I’d get.

I walked down the right-field line and onto the field. I took off my shoes and socks and left them near the foul line. I started walking until I reached center field. I stood there in the dark, looking toward home plate, feeling the blades of grass under my feet.

The next night, my name was on the lineup card.

I put on a game uniform for the first time in longer than I could remember. I made sure everything was perfect, and I checked myself in the mirror without shame. The kids on the team looked at me with a mixture of awe and curiosity. I told them I’d played there before, what seemed like a lifetime ago.

It almost didn’t matter how I did. I had proved to myself I could make it back, that I could turn one positive day into a whole stream of positive days. And all those positive days could combine to create a day as wonderful as this one.

Katie, Julia, and Sierra sat in the stands that night.

I choked back tears during the national anthem. When I came to the plate for the first time — the first time my wife had seen me in a competitive baseball game — Katie sat in the stands with her hands covering her face and cried.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I WOKE UP early on the morning of December 7, 2006, to go deer hunting. Groggy, I dressed quickly and downed a cup of coffee. I grabbed my keys and my phone, and I reflexively checked the screen and saw I had a text message.

From a friend, it read, “jesus never fails.” I was told to pass it along to nine other people and I would “get good news that day.” It wasn’t even 5:00 a.m., but I’m not a big believer in tempting fate, and I’m not a big believer in coincidences, as you might have already gathered. I sent it along to nine other people — what could it hurt? — and didn’t give it a whole lot of thought.

When I finished hunting — no bucks, unfortunately — I went to work for my brother. Jason is a firefighter who runs a tree service on his days off, and he needed help with a job that day. I could use the extra money and I enjoyed spending time with my brother, so I was tossing pine limbs through a chipper around 11:00 a.m. when I got a call from a baseball scout friend of mine.

“You didn’t hear this from me,” he said. “The Cubs just took you in the Rule 5 draft.”

I didn’t know the particulars of the Rule 5 draft, but my friend told me it was good news. The Devil Rays had left me unprotected off the forty-man roster, which meant that any team in baseball could draft me and send $50,000 to the Devil Rays. Maybe the Devil Rays didn’t think I’d get taken, or maybe they thought they’d get lucky and finally get something — anything — for their investment back in 1999.

Whatever the case, my friend the scout finished our conversation by telling me the catch: Whatever team drafted me in the Rule 5 draft had to keep me on the major- league roster throughout the 2007 season or risk losing me back to the Devil Rays. It took a second for me to sort this out in my mind, but when I did, I came up with this summary: If I had a good spring training, chances were I’d be in the big leagues for the entire 2007 season.

In the past four seasons, I’d played very little. Since being reinstated the summer before, I had played fifteen games at Class A Hudson Valley, a far cry from the big leagues. And now, because of some arcane baseball rule, none of that mattered.

I told Jason the news, still not sure how excited I should be. He seemed to know more about it than I did. He shut off the chainsaw and looked at me with big eyes. “That’s awesome,” he said. “Do you understand what that means?”

Just then, my phone rang again. It was the scout again.

“Check that,” he said. “What I told you before was true, but the Cubs just traded you to the Reds. They made a deal before the draft — the Reds wanted you, so the Cubs agreed to draft you first and sell you to the Reds.”

The Cubs, the Reds . . . who really cared? Nothing against the Devil Rays, but there was probably too much history there for me to ever truly break out and succeed. But inside a ballroom at the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, my name had been called twice and my life had taken another unexpected turn.

And this time, miracle of all miracles, the tide seemed to be going my way.

This was the kind of news I was afraid to pray for. This was sent directly from heaven, a phenomenal opportunity. Number-one draft pick or not, I was a twenty-five-year-old man with a history of serious drug problems and less than a hundred at bats above Class A. In the past four years, I had played a total of fifteen games, all at low-level Class A. And now I was being given the opportunity to make a major-league twenty-five-man roster with a productive spring training? Really, all I had to do was show promise and the Reds would most likely keep me around for a while to see what I could do.

I couldn’t help but think of the text message I had received that morning. Jesus Never Fails? I guess. Good news? This was ridiculously good news.

My interest in the tree job immediately disappeared. I got a call from Rob Butcher in the Reds’ media-relations department, telling me the Cincinnati media wanted to talk to me. We arranged a quick press conference over the phone, and within an hour I was sitting on a tree stump talking to reporters on my cell phone, being asked what it felt like to be a major-league ballplayer.

In the background, Jason stood there waiting for me to finish. With a smile on his face, every so often he’d yell something about needing me to get off the phone and get back to work. Didn’t these people understand he had a job to finish here?

It was a pretty cool moment to share with Jason. When he would yell out I’d try not to laugh while holding my hand over the mouthpiece. We’d gone through a lot over the past six or seven years. After being inseparable as kids, we had drifted apart as the drugs took me away from family and friends. He had his life with his two children and his two jobs, and I was the irresponsible one — the prodigal son, even — who squandered everything he was given and still remained the center of attention.

As I sat there talking on the phone and trying not to let Jason make me laugh, I remembered standing on the mound at Tropicana Field two days after the draft, winding up to throw the first pitch and winking at Bro just before I threw it. We hadn’t shared many pure moments since then, but this one felt like a beginning of something and the end of something else.

I made it through the press conference, and I have no doubt my disbelief about the entire turn of events came through loud and clear. I still didn’t entirely understand what had happened to me, but I walked away from my last tree job knowing I had to get to work to make sure the Reds’ confidence in me — or was it more of a hunch, or a calculated risk? — was deserved.

Either way, the Reds showed remarkable confidence in me by giving me a chance to play at the big- league level. The compliment, to me, was directed more toward my recovery than my baseball ability.

It was easy to place a bet on my ability to hit a baseball and track down a fly ball. But based on my personal history, it took serious guts to believe I could stay clean and sober.

Even as I talked to the reporters and expressed my excitement, my confidence was building. I knew that once I got on the field, everything would be just fine. I could play — I could
always
play — and now my mind was as straight as my body.

I remembered what Katie had told me back when I was in the process of wasting my gifts and endangering my life:

God spoke to my soul and told me someday you’re going to be back playing baseball. Josh, there’s a bigger plan for you. When you come back, it’s going to be about more than baseball.

I told her to be quiet back when she said those words. Now, when I got home on the night of the Rule 5 draft, I told her about the text message I had received that morning. Then I hugged her and said, “It looks like you were right all along.”

The signs had been there for some time, ever since I sat in Granny’s back bedroom, fighting off the cravings with Scripture. This was a God thing. How could it be anything else?

Reds general manager Wayne Krivsky called his manager after the Rule 5 draft to tell him the news. Wayne was excited about drafting me and giving me a chance to fulfill all the promise I had misplaced along the way.

And when he told Jerry Narron that he had drafted Josh Hamilton, Narron couldn’t believe it. “I’ve known Josh since he was a kid,” Narron said. Krivsky had no idea. He didn’t know I played basketball with Johnny Narron’s son when I was twelve, or that I’d played for Johnny when I was fifteen, or that Johnny had begged his brother Jerry to come watch me play, promising “You’ve never seen anything like this kid.”

Jerry Narron contacted me, and I got back in touch with Johnny. I started working out even more seriously, intent upon making the most of this chance. I worked out with weights, something I’d done only intermittently in the past. I worked with a medicine ball to increase my bat speed and core strength. Johnny still lived in Raleigh, so he helped me by throwing batting practice and hitting me fly balls.

My recovery was a big topic. It was one thing to play a few games in the minor leagues with my family with me and quite another to face the prospect of an entire major-league season — the travel, the temptations, the down time — so shortly after achieving my sobriety. This was a worry for the Reds, for Katie, and for me. I wanted this opportunity to work out — I wanted that more than I’d ever wanted anything — but I wanted to make sure it was done with my long-term health in mind.